[andypants]

> with WPEngine’s

"WPEngine's" being key here. Some of the banned people are wordpress contributors, unrelated to WPE. The other banned people are not contributors at all and seemingly the only reason they were banned is that matt is angry at their tweets.

[gpm]

You can't cut "WPEngine’s" off from the disjunctive that follows.

> and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’

That clause is why I discussed the evidence that the people banned seem to me to fall under the meaning of the word partners.

[rmccue]

I’ve been deactivated on Slack since very early in this dispute, and later banned from the issue tracker: https://journal.rmccue.io/468/on-contribution/

The only potential cause of this were some posts discussing the arguments behind the original lawsuit - they’re written in my personal capacity, and I’m not a partner of WP Engine. Matt is simply banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made - it’s nothing to do with their partnership status.

(I’m not a WP Engine partner, and my day job is running a competitor to them. Aside from that, I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.)

[SpaceNugget]

They didn't, they emphasized it.

How do you figure that the people mentioned are partners with an unrelated wordpress hosting platform?

[atkailash]

Parters involved in WPEngine so yes, you can cut it off. If they aren’t working on that specifically it’s irrelevant if they’re partners on a separate project, even if it’s similar