Are contracts everything? Matt created Wordpress. I think he’s more deserving of the spoils than some company whose owner is Silver Lake, one of the most evil PE firms.
Accept it, it is the deal with opensource. It's also the basis that people should be using when debating OSS versus other models. People should not be making business or policies or economic decisions based on some unenforceable honor system
That's the entire reason people are so pissed, and what TFA is about. WordPress.org is supposed to be part of the foundation, one that has a charitable purpose to support the WordPress community. It's fine to argue WP Engine was a bad community member, but cutting off access to WPE customers (after demanding payment to Automattic) looks exactly like extortion.
Matt has shown he simply can't be trusted to keep his roles as head of WordPress Foundation and Automattic CEO independent.
>shouldn’t have left their customers wellbeing up to the whims of an organization they were antagonizing.
The point of the article is that it's precisely these actions that have damaged the integrity of WordPress for everybody, because we can now no longer look at WordPress as having stable stewardship, but as something ready to whimsically descend into unpredictable retaliatory actions, without any rhyme or reason or structure.
Once you start talking that way, it seems to me you've completely lost sight of what it is to be the healthy steward of a norms driven foundation. The reason you work out things in charters, and in terms of service and so on is precisely to avoid situations like this, where there are spirals of escalation all hinging on subjective interpretations of everything.
Again, who gives a shit? I'm in no way saying WP Engine is some sort of angelic organization, and I don't care. All I see is childlike behavior from someone who definitely should not be in control of both Automattic and the WordPress Foundation, and my guess is that if the board doesn't force his ouster that WPF will have serious issues with the IRS.
Also, the whole point of open source is that you don't "own it" after it's open sourced. If you don't like those terms, license them under different ones, which exactly what the whole recent "Fair Source" movement is about and what other companies like Sentry have handled in a much more dignified fashion.
Maybe, the newcomers have learnt the lessons from the travails of the old open source projects? That doesn't mean that the oldies should just suck it and keep quiet.