You'll find that the real world is filled to the brim with exceptions, discretion, and the under-the-table deals. The ones who succeed know how to coax and build them. The ones who fail demand hard rules. Typically, those "hard rules" start at 0, and you get nothing.
Unless you accidentally end up doing business with an asshole. Matt is definitely making himself look like a danger to do business with—maybe WP Engine just successfully baited him into acting against his community and killing trust and he's not actually as unhinged as he sounds here... but few people would be willing to bet money on that.
That's the point, they weren't doing business.
They were issuing presumably hundreds of thousands of requests a day and not offering a penny. You will get banned for that on absolutely any service. Any of them, GPL or not.
There's 8 billion people on this planet, from hundreds of different cultures. Everyone has different intuitions, different values, different cultural expectations.
I'm not saying the rules have to be hard rules or anything. But if you can't even articulate the basic shape of the rules, then it's really 100% on you when people don't follow the magic ideas in your head.
I disagree, the asshole move is actually playing stupid. You don't need someone to tell you the rules because the assumption is you're a human adult with a functioning brain, who has the discretion to tell right from wrong and can make good decisions.
I think this incessant hand-holding is rather pathetic.
If I go into starbucks and order 500 iced coffees, they could very well turn me away.
What, but I'm paying! And there's no rule, right? Sure if we decide to play stupid, and pretend this is our first day on Earth. But it isn't our first day on Earth, and this outcome is not only reasonable - it's obvious.
This scenario is even worse, because here WPE isn't even offering to pay. You can't issue hundreds of thousands of requests and then go "what little ole me? I didn't do anything teehee". Stop. They knew what they were doing and they knew they were pushing it way past what a normal user would do.
It seems like that is not really up to me.
When Matt Mullenweg gets up one morning and does not like my commercial product for WP, he might think of me as an asshole and will try to extort money from my business or just ruin it just like he did here.
Hard rules might be fine to take care of things like these.
it is. Don't issue hundreds of thousands of requests and then refuse to pay and you're good.
It's impossible to accidentally do this. Go ahead, write a script to send maximum requests to any free API of your choice. And then track how long before you're banned.
It's that simple and you're all over thinking it. The open source nature has absolutely zero to do with this.
I'd like to see the price list on this beforehand, so I can decide whether I want to be a tiny org or a big one. Where's that pricelist?