WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg privately vented his frustration after a recent court injunction. The preliminary injunction requires Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, to roll back several actions they took this year in their battle with WP Engine. According to 404 Media, which claims to have seen screenshots of now-deleted Slack messages Mullenweg posted following the injunction, the CEO vented: “It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this. I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine.”
Matt may or may not get run out of WordPress (I kinda doubt it), but all the drama definitely begs the question of whether the current ecosystem of WordPress-related businesses can really work with GPL licensing as it currently stands. People have more or less willfully ignored the implications of GPL for a long time, but it certainly enables wholesale grabbing of other people's work as part of the license itself. And the open source community simply hasn't come up with good options for workable governance for large projects like WordPress.