While it’s possible he suddenly woke up one day and decided to become greedy and petty, it seems more likely that with the end of zero-percent interest rates, his investors are nagging him to increase his rate of growth of profit accordingly. Otherwise why rock the boat when, as you note, he’s already making money hand over fist? But it’s not rate of return annually that matters to investors, it’s the rate of growth of rate of return that matters, and that’s almost certainly trending negative by now.
However, if Automattic is indeed flush with unlimited runway, then the lawsuit is not in contention for any resources needed by the Wordpress project, which lends credence to this being simple market manipulation — i.e. “we have ceased Wordpress development to drive the community and userbase into pressuring WPE to increase investment into Wordpress open source work”, which only works when there are few (or no) serious competitors. It could be a precursor to taking future development of the Wordpress project closed-source, too. We can only guess.
> We’re excited to return to active contributions to WordPress core, Gutenberg, Playground, Openverse, and WordPress.org *when the legal attacks have stopped*.
This is a move to show how much the development of WordPress depends on Automattic (some 4k hours per week) and how WP Engine is using the product of that effort without giving much back (45 hours per week) - "A Level Playing Field". It all started from this and it sends a message "don't take it for granted".
https://web.archive.org/web/20240927025102/https://wordpress...
https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledges/?order=hou...
This is an obvious next step — until revenue increases or expenses decrease, Mullenweg’s corporation is no longer investing in Wordpress beyond the critical minimum necessary to present as if everything is fine. The “until WPE concedes” bit is just redirecting the underlying cause, which is that Wordpress.com isn’t increasing their growth in revenue year-over-year, which makes VC-style investors uneasy — they want hockey sticks, not dividends.
The important thing when dealing with this sort of scenario is not to take the person’s accusations at face value, and not to let them distract you from discussing their own circumstances. If Mullenweg’s moves were intelligent and calculated, then what motivations would this psyops-style propaganda represent? That is the million dollar question that matters here, not the substance of whatever his latest attack is.
“Are you so strapped for cash that you can’t afford to pay your lawyers?” is probably the simplest example of the kind of question that needs to be asked of this latest post. “How many months of runway do you have left before the lawsuit bankrupts you?” is the sort of question that the tech press should be asking. Dissecting the surface-level statements feels vengeful and just; discussing the obvious implications and making them the focus of press responses is much more impactful.