alt Hacker NewsI think at this point three things are true. The first is that Mullenweg sincerely believes that WPE should be contributing more than it is to the development of WordPress. The second is that they have no legal obligation to do so, which gives Mullenweg very little leverage to force them to do anything. The final thing is that the setup of WordPress and Automattic and Mullenweg's role in both makes any attempts to apply social pressure to achieve his aims at best a case of bad optics and at worst a saunter through a legal minefield with some hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane strapped to his back.
Sure, and style points for the Derek Lowe allusion. I see why you think this, and probably agree more than disagree.
Three things that have influenced how I look at this:
* The revelation that Mullenweg was asking for headcount allocated to the WordPress project, not simply a cash payment. If you get a giant company rolling that is driven entirely off an open source project, it seems very reasonable to me for the open source project to use whatever leverage it has to get you contributing back.
* Mullenweg's argument that the norm for projects in "his" predicament to simply relicense to non-open-source terms; this seems incontrovertibly true, and also like it does a lot more damage to an open source community than what Mullenweg is attempting to do, which is to demand that a non-contributing company take his project's name out of their (marketing) mouths, and to stop using public services provided at the project's expense. WPE is in a position to mitigate anything Mullenweg can do here, so it's hard for me to sympathize too much.
* I was radicalized on this by working in security products during a time where it felt like dozens of funded startups were just picking up Snort and running with it as their core engine without contributing anything back, including proprietary stuff they built on top of it (and shipped in appliances, avoiding the licensing issues). I keep saying this is a "JABOG" situation, and I do believe that, but I have to remind myself of that to avoid casting one of these parties as the obvious bad guy.