I really hope WPEngine flips the bird at them and forks the WP project.

I work in healthcare in and manage a portfolio of public-facing sites, all on WordPress and all hosted on WPE. Also do occasional volunteer work and side projects where WordPress has been a good fit, depending on the project. Have been happy with WPE’s customer service and product offering and ideologically speaking, I think Matt is in the wrong here and has already done irreparable harm to the Wordpress project.

Due to the chaos one person has been able to cause on such a large open source project, I will be abandoning my use of it in all future personal projects and our organization is also now discussing replacing it completely for all of our sites.

What a waste of effort for a whole lot of people and a shame for the project to fall apart like this.

Yet another tech bro destroying an ecosystem?

It’s happening so much I think it’s like..

It’s the seeming circle of life: here, like a forest fire, it burns down some previous growth : giving new projects access to the sunlight so as to try to grow as fast as possible before the canopy closes up. Then, they too develop their own coked up bro, as an act of pollination giving more fire.

The older tech bro projects are still there, just trimmed back some after layoffs , never harming the core bros

They could have spun this to their advantage but decided to bite the hand that was supporting them for free.

Matt's legacy will be organizations ensuring no single asshat can repeat his unilateral fuckery.