Honestly this whole Matt Vs WPE is seriously messed up or maybe its a start of the end. As they say every king's reign ends. I mean there are so many companies profiting out of WordPress. GoDaddy (with Pagely the OG managed wordpress company and many others) is a big example of how they consolidated so many wordpress companies. Kinsta is big too, LiquidWeb is another one. Not to mention NewFold. The list goes on! Are they all contributing to the core? Endurance had some stake in Automattic but other than that.
A very minuscule percentage of WordPress users contribute to the core.
Plugin and theme makers profit too and not necessarily contribution unless it is absolutely free with no "upsells".
This "forcing" WPEngine to "pay" a certain share of revenue or contribute in kind is not at all open-source behaviour and is only arm-twisting because Matt can under the garb of trademarks. Today it is WPEngine, tomorrow Kinsta or anyone else.
Matt might as well make WordPress a licensed product and collect money from everyone because not every can or would want to "contribute" something "fair" because the very definition of "fair" is skewed.
Not to say that WPEngine is a nice company. Ofcourse by all means if they "ethically" should contribute back to WordPress community and not be leeches. But there are so many leeches of different shapes and sizes. How many more will Matt go behind? Is this a one-off case or a signal? Only time will tell.
