> Is there a clear "bad guy" in this? Yes, but at the same time not really. This is two corporates duking it out. They are behaving like soulless entities th

> Is there a clear "bad guy" in this? Yes, but at the same time not really. This is two corporates duking it out. They are behaving like soulless entities that only care about the money, like all corporates do. Yes, there are people behind those corporates determining how they behave - but there always is. For the most part those people are shielded by the corporate veil, and so most of the normal ethical boundaries humans exhibit when dealing with other humans aren't in evidence. The highly entertaining drama aside, the fallout will likely be minor because it's open source. If it wasn't and one of these corporations are mortally wounded in the fight their proprietary code would die with them. But it's all available on github. If they die and the ecosystem is worth something, someone will reproduce the infrastructure, and all the customers need do it point their auto updates at a different domain name and renew a few credit cards. In fact that is already happening. Automattic has taken over WPEngine's code. Looking at the from the system of ethics that open source has built up over time, it's a dick move. (WPEngine could do the same to Automattic of course, but Automattic owns wordpress.org so to be effective all the customers out there would have to change their auto update domain name to wpengine.com or something. That is unlikely to happen.) But these are corporates. PE firms specialise in dick moves. Surely this behaviour isn't a surprise. What is slightly surprising is WPEngine didn't protect themselves using a contract with Automattic that stopped them from doing this. Only slightly, as I'm sure Automattic would never had agreed to the contract. I guess WPEngine could have distributed their plugins and different way. Maybe they will from now on.