Did I misunderstand something about the scenario here?

Wordpress foundation is a non-profit that develops and hosts installation packages and updates.

WPengine is a for-profit company that sells wordpress hosting.

All WPengine installations constantly look for updates and download these from the wordpress foundation. I'd bet they probably rack up half of their bandwidth costs.

WPengine can of course freely use wordpress' GPLv2 licensed stuff, but it sounds like their leeching of resources was the main pain point.

To either contribute or host their own installation packages sounds like a fair request at the scale WPengine has been operating.

Hetzner, for comparison, sells virtual private servers running Debian. Debian is free, under a similar license as wordpress. Hetzner is a Debian partner and coughs up dough. Hetzner hosts their own mirrors to reduce load on Debian's repositories.

Be like hetzner. Stroke the hand that feeds, or are least don't tug at it.

Sitting in the splash zone of this whole thing, Matt’s contribution to the project is a net negative. Professionally and personally, he is seems unable or unwilling to deescalate conflict. In fact, he creates conflict where none is necessary, and then seems to act shocked and disappointed at the results.

He makes decisions unilaterally that don’t reflect what a thoughtful steward of an open source project would do. (And I say this as a proponent of the idea of the block editor, and as someone for whole building sites with blocks is my bread and butter- except I use ACF, full disclosure.) an example, picayune as it may seem, is the function capital_P_dangit().

It’s not picayune, by the way.

And now this mess. This is by far the most destructive thing he’s done. He needs to be removed.

lol fuck Wordpress. Have you seen that code? 🤢

https://youtu.be/H6F0PgMcKWM?si=zZXJiUp_udnaiRU_