I work in healthcare in and manage a portfolio of public-facing sites, all on WordPress and all hosted on WPE. Also do occasional volunteer work and side projects where WordPress has been a good fit, depending on the project. Have been happy with WPE’s customer service and product offering and ideologically speaking, I think Matt is in the wrong here and has already done irreparable harm to the Wordpress project.

Due to the chaos one person has been able to cause on such a large open source project, I will be abandoning my use of it in all future personal projects and our organization is also now discussing replacing it completely for all of our sites.

What a waste of effort for a whole lot of people and a shame for the project to fall apart like this.

They could have spun this to their advantage but decided to bite the hand that was supporting them for free.

I really hope WPEngine flips the bird at them and forks the WP project.