> WP Engine or their users aren't paying for the services provided by WordPress.org and these are services that cost money for continued hosting Why should WPE

> WP Engine or their users aren't paying for the services provided by WordPress.org and these are services that cost money for continued hosting Why should WPE pay? They are hosting software on behalf of their users. It's (as far as we know) just stock WordPress. Should linode or Hetzner be forced to pay for their users to host WordPress on their servers? The only difference here is that WPE preinstalls WordPress for the user. And to my point, the person who benefits is the end user, not WPE. WPE benefits in so far as their customers get to benefit from these services. But WPE isn't adding URLs to WordPress.org, that's what the software hard codes. So the truth is that yes, WordPress is trying to extract rent, because they gladly let anyone run their software on any server except WPE, and that's the case because they're demanding fees (which are completely arbitrary).