[walkingmiller]

I think that is at least an approximation of what he is trying to do with the trademark issue.

If you want to use the trademark, you have to contribute to the success of the project.

There are plenty of Open Source projects that billion-dollar companies completely rely on without contributing back, and this situation puts those projects and companies at risk. An imperfect analogy might be what happened with the XZ Utils backdoor in Linux. The person maintaining the utility seemed overwhelmed, so he was pressured into accepting malicious actors as maintainers. They were able to introduce a backdoor into the utility. If more of these companies would have contributed to help with the maintenance and development of the utility, this would not have been possible.

If WP Engine starts contributing 5% of their revenue to the WordPress project, it helps protect the project that their entire business is built around.

So I think the questions really should be, "Why does Matt feel like this was necessary in the first place? Why wasn't WP Engine contributing more than 40 hours a week to the project?"