Matt seems to have jumped on WP Engine essentially because they were making a lot of money. So now, any other company that is making a lot of money (or hoping to make a lot money) with Wordpress may wonder whether Matt will target them too.
What's the criteria? Is there some exact revenue or profit number a company needs to stay under to avoid this sort of attack? Does Matt only get mad at hosting companies, or do other companies making a lot of money with WP (e.g. big creative agencies) need to be concerned?
Without clarity, it's hard to quantify the risk. And companies might decide to shift their CMS work elsewhere rather than deal with it. The drama undercuts one of the big advantages of WP: it was free and permissively licensed.
I agree it might not have much effect on random people using or contributing to WP. But open source projects actually need a lot of investment to grow and survive. And anything that depresses that investment can depress the overall project trajectory.
Making a lot of money and contributing effectively nothing back to Wordpress (the open source project).
In WP Engine's own complaint they say that they've "invested hundreds of millions of dollars and 14 years of hard work building a successful business to serve that community", and nothing about contributing to the project itself. Which to me indicates that they indeed have contributed very little to the project they've made a huge amount of money from.
You can argue WPE doesn't need to and that this is a feature (not a bug) of open source. But Matt Mullenweg seems to disagree and wants to use the fact that they are also capitalizing on a trademark they have no license to in order to press the issue.
From my perspective, however, it seems unlikely Automattic will win this. Automattic seems to only be enforcing their trademark as a response to WPE not contributing back to Wordpress, which is not something WPE is legally obligated to do. Trademarks need to be defended universally and without reservation.
What's the criteria? Is there some exact revenue or profit number a company needs to stay under to avoid this sort of attack? Does Matt only get mad at hosting companies, or do other companies making a lot of money with WP (e.g. big creative agencies) need to be concerned?
Without clarity, it's hard to quantify the risk. And companies might decide to shift their CMS work elsewhere rather than deal with it. The drama undercuts one of the big advantages of WP: it was free and permissively licensed.
I agree it might not have much effect on random people using or contributing to WP. But open source projects actually need a lot of investment to grow and survive. And anything that depresses that investment can depress the overall project trajectory.