I’m a little confused by this. Isn’t that what virtually every hosting company does? Is it required for web hosts to be in the business of contributing to open source? What makes WP Engine special here, compared to every other Wordpress host? And didn’t Automattic invest in them?

I think his concern is probably the “WP Engine is about the size of Automattic” part, straight up, probably combined with the squeezing-customers thing. It’s a different shade of AWS-productizing-Redis issue we’ve seen. It will be interesting to see how this goes over.