[Zamiel_Snawley]

Agreed, WP Engine shouldn’t have left their customers wellbeing up to the whims of an organization they were antagonizing.

WP Engine was banking on the free stuff from Wordpress.org, and they got burned because they bit the hand that was feeding them.

[hn_throwaway_99]

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.

[glenstein]

>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.