You can’t license software as open source, with a liberal license, and then get angry when someone profits off of it. That is one of the many valid uses. If you don’t want commercial use, license your property with a limited license that meets your expectations.
Not everything that is immoral will necessarily be illegal. We can't legislate morality. The WordPress.org folks seem to be taking a position that WP Engine's behavior is immoral. That doesn't mean that WordPress.org has some duty to attempt to use every governmental remedy at their disposal to prevent WP Engine from taking these (allegedly) immoral actions. Instead, the folks at WordPress.org are attempting to use public shaming and boycott to bring WP Engine in line.
Do you believe that governmental mandates are the only acceptable solution to (this class of) immoral acts with software?
If what you're saying is indeed the case, that's some awful hypocrisy. WordPress.com (run by Mullenweg!) is not "real WordPress". It disables the installation of most plugins unless you pay them a boatload of money. Arguably, that's just as "hacked up" as what WP Engine is offering.
Imagine going after a direct competitor for doing to your open source project the exact sort of thing that you commercially do to that same project. The idea that they're immune to the morality argument because they contribute to the OSS project more is ridiculous.
The post and your comment are missing the argument for why it’s immoral though. Is taking an open source server project and offering paid hosting based on it immoral? Is it only immoral because they changed a setting from the default?
Would it immoral if I offered a paid hosted MySQL server? Would it be immoral if I changed the columns-per-table limit to 100?
WordPress itself was forked from b2 which is GPL, and now Automattic is worth billions of dollars. Ironic, isn't it, when they accuse WP Engine of the very same behavior they had exhibited?
