[LikelyABurner]

This article is missing the forest for the trees.

The reason why the Automattic/WP Engine fight has become the tech industry's daily soap opera isn't because we're all passionate about website hosting solutions. It's because the ramifications for open source are dire.

This fight is essentially the legal version of the xz-utils supply chain attack. It's a shock to the system that rocks the fundamental assumptions of open source to its core, here, "you can build your product on top of open source and as long as you follow the license you agreed to, you'll be legally fine."

WordPress.org could self-implode tomorrow, and that doesn't matter in the slightest, because the good will of the legal community (if there is such a thing) that the open source community spent decades trying to build up is being destroyed by one unhinged man. Matt may have ended up doing to open source what Bill Gates wasn't able to do in decades at Microsoft.

[ymolodtsov]

OP here. I'm not arguing with this. I was to this scandal very early and immediately started collecting key pieces in a thread and informed a few close reporters who might have been relevant.

There are very good overviews out there, one I linked to in the very beginning. This post is about something else entirely.