Employees describe an environment of paranoia and fear inside Automattic over WordPress chaos.

Out in the cloud world, several companies changed their FOSS license to prevent large cloud providers from making money off their work (eg, Terraform, Redis, Mongo, and ElasticSearch).

Their reasoning was sound, on paper. They were spending a ton of time and money supporting a popular product and the only way to make money on it was by selling hosted services to enterprise. Then these other cloud providers would take their work for free, compete with them for the same customers, and often win.

In almost all these cases, the FOSS developers were pilloried for changing the terms of their original license, leading to immediate forks and fragmentation of the community.

The only outfit that I know of that survived the transition was Thingsboard. They still offer an open-source service, but they take a lot of their enterprise-only adapters and do not offer it as FOSS. Only way to get these is to sign up with their service.

Wordpress could have taken a survey of their highest paying customers, then created features they needed behind a private hosting service. Yes, people would have been unhappy, but the core service would remain FOSS and the company would still make a lot of money.

This whole thing has been done in the worse possible, public, mud-slinging manner. I don't understand who benefits from the scorched-earth approach.