No, why do you use this software? The article even says custom fields is built into WP. I've managed dozens of wp sites and never encountered this plugin.

Why do you use this plugin?

I'm not saying they shouldn't contribute; I'm saying there's no universe in where you should be forced to give 8% (or any amount of) of your revenue to another business as a tithe to be allowed to use GPL software.

It's the method of extraction I'm disagreeing with here, not that they shouldn't contribute to what their business runs on.

And yes, technically it's the Trademark we're discussing rather than the software, but, ultimately, not being able to use the name of the thing is the same impact from a business perspective. Especially because Matt made sure that only Matt has a license to use the name and Matt is the only one who can decide if Matt should allow someone else to use it, also.

It'd be like Linus saying that Canonical can't use the Linux trademark, and then going on an unhinged rant in public about how it's theft that they're using his trademark.

community that is supposed to lift us all up

Sadly, Matt is busy lighting that community on fire because he thinks he's owed something for a business (which he also used to own a major portion of, for the extra lols) using GPLed software, which is also something I, in general, disagree with: the whole point of free software is that it's free. If you want to get rich, make some proprietary software that everyone must use.

creating and sharing WordPress

The hilarious thing here is that WordPress is, itself, a fork of GPLed software. Not saying he didn't spend an enormous amount of time and resources on improving it, but B2 is the reason it's under GPL (since Matt would probably have picked a different license, if he could have.)

There is when you're actively sabotaging the other company trying to use the open source thing you wrote.

Which is what's happening here: Wordpress started out with blocking WPEngine's access to plugins on wordpress.org, which fine, Matt runs it so he can do so. But that's clearly a conflict of interests that he has the unilateral ability to block anyone's access because of a business dispute.

Then he moved on to adding a checkbox that requires you to swear you're not related to WPengine in any way to access wordpress.org as well as banning people that asked any questions on the developer slack, which again, is fine, but it's clearly indicating that Matt has some conflicts he's unwilling to resolve.

Then he forked the most popular wordpress plugin (which is the property of WPEngine) which again, is fine. What WASN'T fine is he redirected the ACF url on wordpress.org to his fork. That's, again, a clear sign he's conflicted as hell and taking actions that are utterly absolutely unaccptable.

If he had just made it a 404, or whatever, then cool. But to just silently give you a different piece of software? He can fuck off with that nonsense.

That's the problem here: he's doing lame-brained nonsense because he believes the opensource side and the business side are both his (because he's structured it so they are) and is actively, and aggressively, doing shit to screw with people he doesn't like because they're a threat to his business.

Not remotely acceptable, and he needs to be slapped down so hard he ends up being six inches shorter.