He tried to extort them. Hosting providers have been selling Wordpress hosting for years without "giving back"
replyDoes Wordpress "give back" to PHP and Linux?
Automattic are the biggest sponsors of the PHP foundation so they do give back there.
replyI think they gave like $100k as a donation, which is great. But they were demanding WPE I think for around 32 million a year or something nuts. You could argue PHP is way more important to WordPress than WPE is.
replyThat's why, at a conference fully paid for by WPEngine, he announced that WPEngine had never paid for anything.
replyHe had a perfectly good example of how to do that productively. His friend Dries Buytaert over in Drupal land has had a commit credit system going for years that has worked well enough that people are constantly trying to game it. Instead he went for the jugular. I really don’t think he’s okay.
replyWordPress is free software. Its users are under no obligation to contribute to its development, or to give money to Automattic.
replyDoes WPEngine have any obligation to contribute back? How is WordPress licensed?
replyOnly to the extent the company pledged to do so.
replyIt did pledge, and the follow-up on that pledge was minimal.
They do not. It's GPL
replyDidn't he start that campaign at a conference for WordPress developers funded by WP engine?
I don't have any insight into what they did or didn't contribute, but it seems their obligation was zero and their level was quite a bit higher than that.
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