8% of *gross revenue* is comical. That's easily their entire profit margin, if not more so. It's hard to imagine anything so out of touch with reality.
The only way out of this would be, "im having a mental breakdown, i'm retracting everything, please bear with me for 6mo"
> 8% of gross revenue is comical. That's easily their entire profit margin, if not more so.
The cheapest wordpress hosting plan they have is $20/month. Even if they gave every site its own dedicated hardware (they dont), gross margins would be over 50%. Since their hosting infrastructure is shared, actual gross margin is probably over 90%.
8% is still an unreasonable ask, but it shouldn't be anywhere close to their entire net profit.
But OTOH spending 8% of gross revenue on developing the core of all their products and services isn't ridiculously high. It may well be more than typical, but not ridiculously so.
Their stack is basically LAMP+Wordpress. 8% on that? I think that's reasonable.
More to the point, while WP Engine had the same right as everyone else to download and install the open source software they use, the right to download, install and use doesn't generate a duty for anyone to supply WP Engine with updates, not even for important things like security fixes. It also doesn't generate a duty for the maintainers to treat WP Engine civilly. Or a duty to serve WP Engine in any way.
Someone who operates a free service to all comers is almost 100% free to stop doing that — or at least not constrained by WP Engine's having downloaded or installed some software. Want to firewall away Iran from your free service? No law prevents you. Want to firewall away WP Engine? Again, no law prevents you, and WP Engine appears not to want to sign a contract that would prevent it.
Normally, we go a little further than the law requires of us. WP Engine's made it fairly clear that it's not going further than required of it, so I don't think it has any right to expect more of Automattic/Wordpress.org than the law requires of them.
(FWIW, I've been in this situation: I've been a full-time maintainer of popular open source code, and some people expected me to do work that they didn't see any reason to pay for.)
The only way out of this would be, "im having a mental breakdown, i'm retracting everything, please bear with me for 6mo"