Ugg. I'd like to hope that Matt had hired better legal advice.
But that didn't happen. Matt this isn't going to end well for anyone. The first rule of holes is "STOP DIGGING" Can you put down the shovel for awhile and try talking to people?
Legally, even taking the whole "copyright infringement equals theft" attitude at face value, it's not, because WordPress is GPL and GPL explicitly forbids adding new restrictive terms to the license, and also forbids combining it with more restrictively licensed code. In fact, in the past, Automattic did to Envato what they did to WP Engine specifically because Envato had taken the position that nulled plugins are infringing.
Of course, Automattic is now suing Festingervault for hosting nulled plugins, because Matt Mullenweg doesn't have principles, he has emotions.
Legalities aside, isn't this the end game for most profit driven companies? Isn't Matt just doing his job here, trying to drive an increase in revenue?
I'm not saying I like it, but, ethics aside (and lets not play dumb here, when do ethics drive business, unless it affects profit), I'm struggling to understand all the outrage over his actions?
But the legalities are the important part of this. You may as well say "Legalities aside, robbing your competitors at gunpoint is a good idea, if unethical". He's essentially setting up a system where if you ever make too much money off of his project, he's very willing to extort you and do plenty of unethical and likely illegal things to you. That's extremely important to the considerations of companies who may be interested in going into business with Wordpress.
It will be interesting when Matt changes his story yet again and issues yet another non-apology.
At this point I'm honestly surprised there are not criminal charges. Just blatantly stealing another business's property/storefront, and then threatening to do the same to other businesses is a shockingly brazen thing to do.
Do you not think the endgame of this is to funnel everyone to Automattic and then raise the rates now that he's exerted a monopoly over Wordpress hosting? Because at this point, I don't see what other exist he has here. This is pure "I own all of Wordpress and it's no longer open source and I can charge anything I want" or he's going to be bankrupted by the lawsuits.
[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/secure-custom-fields/
reply