[lolinder]

One of the two entities completely controls the plugin ecosystem and wielded that control against the other entity (the largest WordPress host except, possibly, Automattic itself) to block them and all of their customers out of the ecosystem over this dispute.

That's why this matters to average developers. WordPress is the plugin ecosystem, and messing around with it does as much damage to the WordPress ecosystem as left pad did to npm—it's not unrecoverable, but it's a major setback that could quickly become unrecoverable.

[technion]

Note that one of the most popular plugins, to the point many WordPress people suggest it's the only plugin that should be part of core, is acf. Which is a plugin contributed by wp engine.

[pclmulqdq]

I believe WPEngine is actually larger than Automattic. This is an attempt to get the bigger (and likely better) company to pay the bills of a company that took a bit too much VC money and now needs the revenue to support it.

[dmix]

Does Tumblr make Automattic much money?

[pclmulqdq]

I doubt that a website they bought for $3 million from Yahoo is a significant contributor to their net income.

[creinhardt]

Is WPEngine actually the biggest Wordpress host? I'd have bet that GoDaddy had more, or maybe even BlueHost/HostGator/EIG.

[jameslk]

The more you press the nuclear button, the more you damage your reputation. I’m of the opinion that the circumstances here are exceptional and rationality will prevail

[lolinder]

The damage to your reputation comes because pressing the nuclear button even once is an unhinged thing to do. The reputational damage is because once you've pressed it once we consider it more likely that you'll press it again because you've shown yourself to be the kind of person who presses that button.

[bigiain]

Yep. We no all know not to trust anything that Matt or any of his businesses or non-profits are involved with.

Unless WordPress, both the open source codebase and the plugin/theme publishing/distribution channels, are completely free of Matt's influence - they are now a serious risk any business using Wordpress needs to address and mitigate.