wp.org is not a non-profit, despite the name. The actual non-profit [1] had expenses of $41k in 2022, which wouldn't come anywhere near paying for wordpress.org infrastructure and personnel. I guess Wordpress is going the RHEL route. You can clone it, but can't use their trademarks or infrastructure.
Automattic's associate legal counsel begs to differ [1]:
> Let’s apply this to the WordPress trademarks (also called simply “marks”). The WordPress Foundation owns the right to use the WordPress marks for non-commercial purposes. It can also sublicense out this right for particular events (e.g., WordCamps) and to people supporting the WordPress project and community. The Foundation also licensed the name WordPress to the non-profit WordPress.org, which runs a website that facilitates access to WordPress-related software.
They tried to set it up that way and were denied. Apparently the flip side of that is they no longer feel constrained to not "Us[e] the resources of the non-profit you control to kneecap a competitor to the for-profit you control."
So like I said, at this point it's no different than RHEL's very stringent trademark protections, and restrictions on using their update servers (cdn.redhat.com) if you're not paying them. The only difference here is that if WP Engine was itself a non-profit, Matt wouldn't be going after them. RHEL is not as generous.
Apparently these are the new rules. If you're a for-profit entity advertising "Wordpress Hosting" instead of "Hosting with Wordpress installed" and want access to the infrastructure of wordpress.org (which costs millions of dollars a year) you now have to pay, either in cash or equivalent contributions.
Personally that seems fair. It should have come with a minimum 90 day public notice period, and the stuff about being a cancer etc. is pretty crazy. Changing marketing language and setting up your own plugin mirror like Bluehost did (https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror) is not the end of the world.
I think it's obvious WPE wouldn't be in the clear with Matt even if they went and hosted a mirror/cache of the WP.org packages.