I'm wondering what any lawyer here on HN has to say about how much of a claim WP Engine has against them being banned from the WP.org plugins repository. My layman's understanding of the law tells me that they have no claim whatsoever; you can't assert rights from something that's provided for free, let alone something so expensive to run. The only claim they may have is related to it being used as a means to extort them, but that is a separate issue.
Not a lawyer, it likely becomes an issue, because a) by Matt's own words wordpress.org is operated and maintained by Automattic employees and thus b) the blocking essentially leads to competitive disadvantage and a general conflict of interest.
But maybe there's also some law that can be leverage, that you can't just block one company, especially if it's some common good or so.
In the real world, if you tell people X and insist that X is true, X becomes something of a binding promise on you. In this case X is "you can use the letters WP to imply WordPress in your branding."
There are several torts around this sort of thing, like promissory estoppel.
Not a lawyer, but I assume WP.org can ban whomever they like. Now, if they did it because WP.com asked them to, the non profit status becomes a question. Furthermore, WP hardcodes the URL for the resource, meaning you cannot self host the plugins even if you wanted.
