Feels an awful lot like Matt's just angry that he didn't move on to the final stage of enshittification soon enough. WPEngine is making "too much money" that he want's in his own pocket.

Fuck website owners. Fuck agencies using WordPress for their clients. Fuck hosting companies who offer WordPress hosting. Fuck theme and plugin developers. Even fuck non Automattic WP core developers.

It's all about funnelling all the money to Matt now.

We had a big discussion at work yesterday. We are now actively researching WordPress alternatives for the two dozen or so client sites we run on WordPress and WPEngine.

In the short term, we're planning to rely on WPEngine to keep some form of WordPress and plugin/theme repo available and provide at least security updates for core and the largest plugins (either via the plugin authors, or by patching their local repo with security bug fixes if needed).

In the medium term we are planning to increase our use of static site gen to publish WP sites to S3/CloudFront wherever possible, as a stopgap before we migrate sites off WP.

In the long term we are going to completely remove Automattic/wordpress.org/Matt from our business. This might be by staying with WPEngine using whatever they end up pivoting their platform to. This may end ups with ClassicPress or some other WP fork. We feel we have a reasonable amount of time to let everything play out and make the best future decision, but we are also developing a disaster plan to ensure we can keep out existing client sites functional and secured very quickly - even if some loss of functionality is the result.

Matt's WordPress is dead to us. I feel sorry for all the plugin and theme developers we buy paid WP themes/plugins from. None of them deserve this. None of out clients deserve this. I suspect none of the wordpress.com and Tumblr customers deserve what's about to happen to them either.

Matt though? You totally deserve to have your life's work and what _could_ have been an ongoing legacy completely destroyed.