alt Hacker NewsWork for me or I will publicly shame you, try to damage your reputation, and make your employees potentially question your loyalty.
Threatening people if they don’t take a job with you is in the most literal way a challenge to your autonomy as a human being.
I think a lot of this whole saga is easier to understand if you just remember that WordPress is a major open source project and a company, so you get to see a lot of the stuff every company --- almost none of whom run major open source projects --- does in the ordinary course of business.
Anyways, if you thought there was any freedom or purity to the tech job market, bad news for you.