Second, consider that you may be going through a midlife crisis, and projecting it onto this issue as a struggle for your LIFE's work. This midlife transition and maturing is perfectly normal, its largely hormonal and psychological, and it provides a chance for a person to review his or her life, making some people properly do that and making some people react strongly by rejecting to do that. It does feel like you are doing the latter by identifying yourself with Wordpress and taking this incident as an assault on your persona.

You are not Wordpress. You are a person called Matt, who has infinite facets in him like any other person and like any other person, you just cant be simplified and described by any singular thing, including things like open source projects, like Wordpress. So stop identifying yourself with Wordpress and calling it your 'life's work'. You are just 40 years old for f*ck's sake. Based on the statistics today, your generation has another 50 to go.

Indeed, you have put a lot of time and effort into Wordpress and succeeded in making great positive change with much, much impact. This is great, it is a big success and all of us are grateful for it. But stop identifying yourself with it and projecting your persona onto it and entering into personal fights over it - for that is what this is starting to look like. You will keep existing as who you are with or without Wordpress. Hopefully, you will straighten things up and sort out this matter, learn a few things in the process and do even more contributions to Open Source and Wordpress.

But for now, just stop talking publicly about this, let your lawyers talk, and take some time to reflect on what is written above.