WP Engine could legally do this, but if they had the development resources to do so, Matt Mullenweg probably wouldn't be doing legally questionable and morally reprehensible things to try and coerce WP Engine into funding WordPress itself. Maintaining a fork of WordPress with its own independent development priorities would involve a lot of work.

What WP Engine will most likely do is run their own plugin repository mirror, strip off whatever trademarks they don't feel legally empowered in using, and move on. WordPress cannot legally exclude WP Engine from using WordPress code.

I think the bigger problem would be, would they be willing to invest the engineering resources to do all that.

If the crux of the argument is that WP Engine doesn’t give back, I wonder how likely it would be that they’d be willing to do that.

Of course, if they were willing, they’d be allowed to do that and might even find success. I’ve often wondered why a host hasn’t tried to do a more focused WP-fork and the main conclusion I’ve come to is that they just aren’t willing to invest the significant resources that that would require.

It wasn’t a host, but CraftCMS was born out of ExpressionEngine (not the code; the Craft code all unique) and the makers of the most popular EE plugins being frustrated with the core EE direction.

Craft has a thriving business and EE has been sold several times and is much smaller than it was, so it ultimately worked.

But that was in some ways the opposite of this scenario; you had some of the largest ecosystem members who were unable to contribute meaningfully to core (because of the license/structure of EE at that time), opting to do their own thing.

I don’t anticipate any of the major hosts willing to invest what it would take to build/maintain their own WP fork.

They would need to, as Matt is in full on WAR mode shooting rockets a civilians too (he disabled WPEngines sites access to the plugin repository). Basically starving out anyone who needs to do anything. This is dangerous as plugins all need to be updated constantly less you get hacked as soon as an exploit is found. It's like they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Matt pretty much has an iron grip on Wordpress which had humble beginnings but turned into the google/facebook of websites.

You could make the fork five times faster, a tenth of the code, have every paid feature like Jetpack and Akismet built in for free, and include coupons for unlimited handjobs and ice cream, and it would still go nowhere without the WordPress brand. It's not the same audience as Terraform. Every time I get the itch to start cleaning out WP's Augean Stables with some kind of compatibility layer on top of modern tech (same idea as Drupal 8+) I have to remind myself of that depressing fact: no one will care that it's better.

I am just hoping that someone more connected to and respected within the WP community takes up the mantle; the fact that I can't even name such a person makes me pretty unqualified to lead a fork. But this is not the first iteration of #wpdrama, won't be the last, and my mental health is probably better served by putting WP in the rear view once and for all.

Honestly, I'd be all for a fork. Wordpress is dying a slow death. The only way forward I see is to break with the history that's holding it back and make radical changes to its architecture. Matt will never do that. Perhaps WP Engine can.

It would be an utter failure. WP Engine is just a hosting provider. Their entire business model is based on the name recognition of Wordpress. And Wordpress itself is built on ancient technology. So you are saying leave the brand and take the ancient technology then try to make it successful under a completely new brand? It’s a nonsense.

WP Engine can't afford to get even a single developer to work on Wordpress. How do you imagine them handling a fork?