The argument centering on server costs would be logical, but the actual legal battle going on, and Mullenweg’s stated justification behind asking for 8% of WPEngine profit, is claims of misuse of copyrighted names.
Meanwhile the WordPress license explicitly cedes copyright over the name WordPress and the initialism WP.
Then why does WP engine need access to this specific database?
Because Wordpress is also hosting 1000s of plugins that WP engine users can install.
I’m not sure what the license regarding those things is, WP engine could probably just mirror it -
But they basically got locked out of the default ecosystem infrastructure.
I feel like mirroring the plugins would resolve this issue, since the argument seems to be centered on server costs.
The argument centering on server costs would be logical, but the actual legal battle going on, and Mullenweg’s stated justification behind asking for 8% of WPEngine profit, is claims of misuse of copyrighted names.
Meanwhile the WordPress license explicitly cedes copyright over the name WordPress and the initialism WP.