This is very entertaining.
In order to give myself and the many tired volunteers around WordPress.org a break for the holidays, we’re going to be pausing a few of the free services currently offered:
- New account registrations on WordPress.org (clarifying so press doesn’t confuse this: people can still make their own WordPress installs and accounts)
- New plugin directory submissions
- New plugin reviews
- New theme directory submissions
- New photo directory submissions
We’re going to leave things like localization and the forums open because these don’t require much moderation.
As you may have heard, I’m legally compelled to provide free labor and services to WP Engine thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers, so in order to avoid bothering the court I will say that none of the above applies to WP Engine, so if they need to bypass any of the above please just have your high-priced attorneys talk to my high-priced attorneys and we’ll arrange access, or just reach out directly to me on Slack and I’ll fix things for you.
I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year. Right now much of the time I would spend making WordPress better is being taken up defending against WP Engine’s legal attacks. Their attacks are against Automattic, but also me individually as the owner of WordPress.org, which means if they win I can be personally liable for millions of dollars of damages.
If you would like to fund legal attacks against me, I would encourage you to sign up for WP Engine services, they have great plans and pricing starting at $50/mo and scaling all the way up to $2,000/mo. If not, you can use literally any other web host in the world that isn’t suing me and is offering promotions and discounts for switching away from WP Engine.
Yep. While WP Engine definitely aren't heroes here, Mullenweg has been mixing his business and the Wordpress org for a long time, and the licensing terms he decided upon for WordPress and the initialism WP didn't support the "special case" situation he tried to force WP Engine into.
If he had just kept his damn mouth shut and changed the usage/licensing terms so that commercial resellers over a certain size had to pay back into the costs for support, this wpuld have never been news.
I highly doubt he's been told that he must provide free support, and I suspect that he's just been told that by his own rules he must provide the same free support for them that he provides to all of the other users.