In the past few weeks, I've started doubting that. I would have no problem if Automattic/WPF went to court, and asked for an injunction against WPEngine for trademark infringement. But instead of dealing with this in court, they've weaponized the control they have to engage in an erratic "scorched earth" campaign.
My product is finished and my pilot users love the product. But it's hosting-related, and I could easily imagine myself in the same position as WPEngine. I'm also concerned about WPFs supply chain attacks: cutting off update access to users; replacing a plugin and pushing code into user's websites; etc. If those tactics were used against my startup, it may be difficult to keep it operating.
I could just launch and hope this is just a WPEngine problem. But right now, I can pivot into another framework with a couple months of work; and won't have to worry about how to handle WordPress users on the product.
What to do? Launch, pivot, wait? something else?
Magento is an extreme case but under the hood, most of the "hosting-related" things one wants to add intelligence for (backups, static content generation, caching, monitoring) are common to lots of PHP applications.
What about adding a library (if that's how your tool provides integration) for generic PHP (e.g. Laravel) applications?
That is, instead of pivoting to another single framework, what about pivoting to being PHP-supportive and framework-agnostic?
[0] InvoiceNinja may have licence restrictions that prevent you offering an integrated service, I've not checked recently. I guess others might too.
You can easily imagine making $400 millions per year, and contributing close to nothing back to the open source software?
> But right now, I can pivot into another framework with a couple months of work
If you become as big as WP Engine, you'd have money for those couple of months to support another framework too.
> pivot into another framework with a couple months
Sounds like a misjudgement to wait for that long and not launch now, I think. I wish you good luck whatever you choose :-)
(With all that said, right now I do think Matt did some or a bunch of mistakes. I hope he realizes sooner or later.)