Are contracts everything? Matt created Wordpress. I think he’s more deserving of the spoils than some company whose owner is Silver Lake, one of the most evil PE firms.
Reminder: https://www.wired.com/2011/06/skype-silver-lake-evil/
Reminder: https://www.wired.com/2011/06/skype-silver-lake-evil/
WP Engine was banking on the free stuff from Wordpress.org, and they got burned because they bit the hand that was feeding them.
Matt has shown he simply can't be trusted to keep his roles as head of WordPress Foundation and Automattic CEO independent.
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.
... the Managing Partner of one of those evil PE firms.
Also, the whole point of open source is that you don't "own it" after it's open sourced. If you don't like those terms, license them under different ones, which exactly what the whole recent "Fair Source" movement is about and what other companies like Sentry have handled in a much more dignified fashion.