This destroys the Wordpress ecosystem in one move. Who is going to pick Wordpress after this for a project if the Wordpress leader can hamstring their site for reasons completely outside of their control?
This entire debacle also hurts the entire open source community. Look, if you think there's a trademark violation then sue them for it by all means (but since they let this go for so many years the outcome of this likely will be cancellation of the trademark) but the rest? just don't.
Edit: by "the entire debacle" I meant not this specific even but how WP Engine claimed Mullenweg demanded money, slandered them , all that.
Well, hang on, all over this discussion you have a Automattic employee being quite clear (in their understanding) that wordpress.org is something Matt benevolently lets the Foundation use.
But as you'll read, there is so much murkiness to this that a mud bath would be positively transparent. The .org is not the foundation, but the foundation says that it pays for the .org, the .org is not the foundation but lives on the foundation's AS.
I doubt much if anything will happen, but all this seems to be doing to me is shining a light on how the distinction between Matt, Automattic, WP.org, WPF, and WP.com all vary depending on Matt's needs, wants and priorities on any given day.
Because in a few months, people won't remember the details, but they will remember "the time the Wordpress guy abused his influence to damage the Wordpress ecosystem".
Or, alternatively they could remember "the time the Wordpress guy smacked freeloader leeching off the Wordpress ecosystem"
Apart from that - major turbulences in the WP and in general CMS world could be a positive thing. Maybe it's time for a new player in the space. Wordpress absolute dominance for basically decades kind of sucks air out of the space for competitors, there are some like Ghost and others but they are barely crawling compared to WP market share.
Apart from that even fork within WP itself wouldn't necessary be a bad thing - some decisions and direction of the WP itself are questionable looking from developer standpoint like bringing to life insanely complicated React-based toolkit as WP editor building block, archaic conventions in the PHP codebase, lack of standardized patterns and guidelines for plugins creation and many more.
Personally I would love to have PHP-based CMS, built either based on Symphony or Laravel with extensive plugins and theming, capabilities and resonable market share.
Yeah, I recently looked into their "Starshot"[0] initiative to make their CMS more appealing and it's interesting to some degree, but we'll see when it comes out - presumably ~ Jan 15, according to the video
Open source has nothing to do with free support/development and... now apparently it needs to be said out loud that it has nothing to do with free hosting...
This entire debacle also hurts the entire open source community. Look, if you think there's a trademark violation then sue them for it by all means (but since they let this go for so many years the outcome of this likely will be cancellation of the trademark) but the rest? just don't.
Edit: by "the entire debacle" I meant not this specific even but how WP Engine claimed Mullenweg demanded money, slandered them , all that.