Matt got upset because they forked his open source project and built a hundred million dollar revenue business on top of it without contributing anything back to WordPress.

He'd have more of a leg to stand on if WordPress wasn't itself a fork of an open source project.

Matt should have built something open core or fair source licensed - free for customers, but stops competitors from stealing your lunch. He has no legal ground to argue his case now.

It's a much bigger deal with hyperscalers poaching and stealing, like AWS and GCP ripping off and stealing most of the revenue from Redis and Elasticsearch. That's dishonest and evil in my mind.

Totally orthogonal to this issue of marketing comparisons.

WPE never forked a thing. They were a successful company after he backed out of an investment with them, he resented the success, blackmailed them for 8% of their top-line revenue, then threw a tantrum when they told him to pound sand.