I like the idea social media is for kids only and adults are banned. If that applies to advertisers and bots too then it could be a winner!

What on Earth are you on about? This has nothing to do with licensing. The issue is a business using another organization’s resources without paying for it, all while earning a profit for themselves.

This isn’t about open source, personal attacks, or “brain cells.” It’s about fairness and the responsible use of resources. WPEngine is a profitable company that has the means to manage its own infrastructure instead of relying on WordPress.org’s updates system. If you’re going to run a business that depends on open-source software, there’s an expectation of contributing back or, at the very least, not exploiting the resources of a non-profit.

So let’s focus on the actual problem: a large company exploiting a shared ecosystem to run a commercial service.

As a career WordPress developer, I fully support WordPress’s stance on this issue. It’s unreasonable for a company to siphon resources from a non-profit to fuel their own hosting business.

For smaller companies, lacking the ability to manage their own updates or CI/CD processes is understandable. But WPEngine is a large organization—they have the resources and capacity to handle these issues in-house. They could have easily avoided this situation without turning it into a turf war.

Edit: I see the WPEngine fans have arrived. Feel free to downvote, but that doesn’t make you right!

Good news everyone!