What I meant was does Matt wish for all hosts to fork the repository so it is not a central place for plugins? To appearances Wordpress was architected to work the way it does, suggesting that he wished it to work the way it does.

If the central repository is a problem, then each site draws on it in proportion to their usage and it isn't obvious why one site is an issue and others aren't.

Hence my question, does he wish hosts to move away from a central repository? He certainly can advocate for that but it's a larger issue than WPEngine.

Also sort of adjacent but Matthew Prince of Cloudfare has just offered to donate resources to fund the whole central repository: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1841154152006627663

I don't think anybody, including Mullenweg, is seriously claiming WPE is threatening the integrity of the WP.org servers with all their load. It seems pretty clear that WP.org is a stick the Foundation is going to use to get commercial WP users to kick in resources, along with the WP trademarks.

The norms of open source software don't really have much to say about this. Mullenweg is right: the typical thing companies that run GPL projects do when they end up competing with firms that don't pay their freight is to relicense. Being a little ruthless with trademarks seems strictly superior to switching to a "source available" license.

As announced by @wpengine on that ex-bird-site, they are mirroring the wordpress.org repos now, as well as serving their own compatible plugin management API (one caveat they mentioned is that search isn't exactly the same).

I do hope they open source the API. I might take a stab at implementing it using wpackagist (though possibly that's what they're using to mirror already)