Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?

What I am not seeing in any of the discussions about this is the connection with various database products that used to be Open Source but then changed their licenses because they didn’t like AMZN and the like offering hosted versions of their products without paying anything. It’s a similar situation.

Well, they changed their licenses. That's not what happened here.

It’s another way of fighting back which could be more or less effective. (Right now I am dreading that I’ll need to change the database my RSS reader users because I can’t really use it commercially or open source the code.)

Because database products didn't build a platform in hopes that Amazon would add features to it, it's quite the opposite.

This looks more like Amazon copying products from successful sellers on its marketplace, then pushing them to the side.

Wordpress can't because it was a fork of b2/cafelog. You can't un-GPL code you didn't own in the first place.

How much of that code is still left? I’d think the bigger problem is that they’d have to get everyone who ever contributed to it not as an Automattic employee to agree to a re-license.

Seeing how Matt has acted in the last couple of days, I wouldn't be surprised if they're just going to yank the license from under the project, and just wait for the lawsuits.

It's quite similar, and in both cases the problem is the same: open source is not a business model.

You can make a business that supports an open source product by providing hosting or services, but you cannot expect to be the largest provider or to make the most money off of it because you're giving away much of your labor for free.

This is all well and good if you're a company whose mission is simply to ensure that the software survives—in that case your business exists precisely to enable you to give away free labor—but we run into issues when companies want to become large and profitable and pay off investors.

That's why AWS's hosting is a problem. If you look at each database who's done it it's never about sustainability for the project, it's always that the for profit entity isn't profitable enough.

True. I’ve never seen someone destroy a multi-decade open source community so effectively.