It’s difficult to take the interview seriously. Very disappointing and a waste of time in my opinion.
The other side is that... years later, Matt spent $100,000 just to spite the developer by buying the domain he wanted. Imagine spending six figures just to spite someone. That's a lot of meals for hungry school kids.
This is really scary behaviour for anyone. Let alone the leader of a community.
You're right, he answered later though with the example of reselling GPL licensed plugins. I guess I missed that at first.
I just stopped watching after an hour, after the arguments about who should actually pay the fee and who should not. No other companies seem to have to pay the 8% fee, but then he decides that WPE should do it and maybe because they hurt his feelings, they probably need to pay even more - his own words.
It also provides another example of Matt exploding with a personal vendetta (IMO). Which is highly relevant to what's happening now. It's a pattern.
https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/thesis/
Pearson never made amends; he continued his bad actions long after being called out (and possibly still does).
The correct solution to bad actors is to raze them to the ground; Matt isn't wrong in this. He has the means and is doing something principled with them: Destroying a bad actor.
This should be encouraged; it is how capitalism is supposed to work.
(For clarity, I'm specifically talking about buying the thesis.com domain name, which he couldn't use because Pearson had the trademark).
It's vindictive and wasteful. Period. That's $100,000 ($132,000 in today's dollars) that could have gone to making the WordPress community better, some other charitable cause, or even a nice vacation for Matt and his family.
I'm sorry, but that is not normal or "principled" behaviour and it's not something that should be "encouraged".