You also don’t get to randomly change license terms because you’re having a childish meltdown because someone earns money with an open source product while according to the terms of the license of the said product.
You also don’t steal code from a user of your platform and maliciously redirect to your fork.
This is not about WPE vs Matt’s lack of brain cells. This is also not about hardlining on what’s open source or not. But Matt needs to lose this fight, not only because of his decisions, but because if he wins, he not only successfully burned down WordPress, but the open source ecosystem as a whole.
If you publish something with a license that allows people to earn money without paying a share to you, don’t be butthurt if people won’t do that. And if you don’t want that - change the license properly and carry the consequences.
Sorry, but you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. It’s absolutely and only a licensing issue, and as a user of open source software you are obligated to do what the license states. WordPress is licensed under GPL, which explicitly allows software being run for any purposes, explicitly including commercial purposes. The giving back part would come into play if WPE would use WordPress as part of their own software - which they don’t.
WPE did what the license, and therefore Matt and Automattic allowed them to. Matt decided to try and literally extort money from them, before going on his fully fledged meltdown.
Whether WPEs business model is morally questionable is irrelevant. They did play by the rules. Matt did not.
And the situation is not new, as far as I remember redis was the last big player in that situation. But they also did play by the rules, they changed their license starting from a given version, made big hosters that made money by redis-as-a-service pay for using redis, and took the L like grown ups by losing their FOSS community and having valkey as a hard fork and direct competitor now. No drama, no meltdowns, no shit storms and no lawyers involved.