WordPress is copyleft (GPL), and copyleft is open source.
And these are the consequences and indeed the intentions of open source. There's no "ripping off", this is what Open Source licenses permit. If contributors didn't want this to be possible, they shouldn't have licensed their software this way.
(Of course, WordPress itself is a fork of a GPL project, so didn't have the option, and you could equally say it's "ripping off" that project. But we don't. Because it's open source. And that's how it works.)
This argument is highly strained. Yes, it is nice of people to support the OSS projects they use.
But you’re essentially claiming that no one can offer any kind of managed platform built on open source tools without contributing to them. No one should profit off of, say, Linux, by selling you access to a Linux VM. No one should profit off of git by providing a managed git repository. No one should profit off of react by using it for their money-making website.
That would be absurd. WP Engine is by no means close to the equivalent of an AWS in the WordPress world. There are thousands of WP hosts, few of which actively contribute much back to WP. But that’s frankly just how OSS works, and everyone knows that’s the case. No one is starting OSS projects expecting ever user to contribute back.
And by the way, I’m a developer who contributed to WordPress quite a bit. Automattic is not being “left out to dry” by companies selling WordPress hosting without contributing back. In fact, it (used to be) one of the most valuable companies in the space, precisely because it has influence over 40% of websites in a way WP Engine doesn’t.
All Matt did was poison the ecosystem with a rug pull. The best you can do as an OSS leader is encourage other companies to contribute with things like Five for the Future. Beyond that, you don’t have recourse.
WP Engine would only be a truly toxic player if they had high or undue expectations from the OSS project in the form of large numbers of bug reports, feature requests, or complaints. As a WordPress contributor, I never saw that to be the case. All they did was sell web hosting the same way thousands of other companies do in the ecosystem.
