I’m not here to argue who’s right.

I have opinions. Everyone does. But after fifteen months of watching this play out in public, I’ve landed somewhere simple: it no longer matters who started it or who’s owed what. Whatever the verdict, WordPress is the one bleeding out.

So I won’t relitigate any of it. I just want it to end.

Nobody Is Headed Toward a Win

Step back from who’s right and look at where this is actually going.

Fact discovery just closed. The jury trial isn’t set until 2027. That’s almost two more years of motions, depositions, and sealed filings — two more years of the best people on both sides pouring their time and money into a courtroom instead of into the thing they each claim to care about. And at the end of it, the thing everyone’s fighting over will be smaller than it is today.

The principals seem to sense it; there have been public gestures toward ending this from inside the conflict. But gestures aren’t settlements, and the calendar keeps running.

When you’ve got two years to go and the asset shrinks the whole way down, you’re not fighting to win anymore. You’re just fighting.

Play It All the Way Out

Pick a winner — either one — and follow it to the end.

Say one side gets everything it asked for: the injunctions land, the damages land, the other side is bound or broken. By now the dispute reaches well past the original questions, all the way to the institutions at the heart of the project — including the nonprofit that funds WordCamps and open-source education worldwide.

Then what?

Whichever way it breaks, the same machinery takes the hit: the infrastructure, the events, the people paid to work on Core as their actual job, the trust that made companies comfortable building on top of all of it. A total victory for anyone establishes, in open court, that being deeply involved in WordPress is a liability to be litigated rather than a contribution to be valued.

So who funds the WordCamps then? Who keeps WordPress.org online? Who underwrites the next decade of Core?

You can win every claim and still wake up to a WordPress no one wants to invest in. The lawyers get paid. Someone gets a war story. And the project that powers 43% of the web begins a slow, unglamorous collapse — not with a bang, but with a backlog of unmerged pull requests and a community that’s lost its center of gravity.

Is that a win? For anyone?

This Part Is Black and White

People want this to be complicated. It isn’t.

The lawsuit is hurting WordPress, and every party in this fight has its fortunes tied to WordPress. Hurt the platform and you hurt your own position in it — no matter which side of the “v.” you’re on. That’s the whole equation, and it isn’t hypothetical. The signs are already there for anyone watching:

• WordPress’s growth has stalled. The platform spent a decade expanding its share of the web almost without interruption. That momentum has faltered — and it faltered while everyone was fighting instead of building.
• Value is eroding on both sides. The companies at the center of this have each faced harder questions about what they’re worth than they did before the conflict began. Two parties under pressure, one shared cause.
• The asset itself loses value the longer this runs. Uncertainty is the most expensive thing in any market, and a multi-year lawsuit manufactures it by the month.

Nobody is getting richer. Both sides are bleeding value at once, fighting over a pie that shrinks every month they argue about who deserves the bigger slice.

We Already Ran This Experiment

Here’s the hopeful part — and it’s not a theory. We watched it happen.

When the fight was at its hottest, the community got nervous. Respected, longtime contributors built an escape hatch: FAIR, a way to route plugin and theme updates around the central infrastructure so the ecosystem would no longer have a single point of failure. People were quietly building the exits.

Then the temperature dropped, and FAIR lost momentum — not because it failed technically, but because once the conflict cooled, fewer people saw the urgency in routing around a fight that seemed to be winding down. The effort that had felt essential at the peak of the drama quietly wound down as the heat came off.

That’s the whole case for settling, demonstrated in real time. The exits only get built when people are afraid. The moment things calm down, the community stops fleeing and comes home. Fear fragments. Peace heals.

Drag this out and you invite the next FAIR — one that may not wind down so gracefully. And it’s worth remembering that even the people building those escape hatches tended to acknowledge there was something real in the underlying grievance, even as they rejected the tactics. Reasonable people can see merit on more than one side here. Which is exactly why this doesn’t need a verdict. It needs an ending.

To the Parties Footing the Bill

Whoever you are in this — the hosting company, the platform, the investors behind either — set the grievance aside for a moment and look at the asset.

These are WordPress businesses. Their products, their revenue, their valuations rest on one thing: WordPress being healthy, trusted, and everywhere. That’s the shared thesis. That’s the collateral every party is spending down.

So when market share slides, when the community builds escape hatches, when enterprises start calling the ecosystem unstable and move their money — that isn’t damage anyone is doing to an opponent. It’s damage to the ground all of you stand on.

You don’t get to burn down the neighborhood and still collect rent.

Win in 2027 and you can still lose, because the WordPress left standing will be smaller, more fractured, and worth less than the one any of you built on. The clean exit, the strong quarter, the defensible valuation — all of it gets harder every month this drags on. For anyone whose business depends on a thriving WordPress, that should settle it.

To Everyone Else

You’ve probably picked a side. I’m not asking you to switch it. I’m asking you to see that the side-taking is part of the problem.

Every month this grinds on, real people pay. Contributors burn out. The release pace has slowed. Flagship community events have felt the strain as attention and sponsorship get pulled elsewhere. Trust erodes. The thing we built together gets more brittle by the week. Nobody walks away from a war like this unscarred — not the winners, not the losers, and least of all the bystanders who just wanted to build websites.

Enough.

Settlement Isn’t Surrender

We have a model for this. When Node.js tore itself apart over governance, nobody litigated it into the ground — the parties moved to neutral ground and re-merged inside a year. Node.js didn’t just survive. It came back stronger.

We’ve seen the other ending too: conflicts that festered until the community forked and the original withered into a husk. The only difference between those outcomes is whether the people in charge chose to stop.

That’s the choice on the table. Settle, stabilize, and let WordPress get back to being worth fighting over — or grind to 2027 and find out which ending everyone bought.

This isn’t surrender for anyone. It’s the adult move: choosing the thing you built over the need to be proven right.

The lawyers are winning. Let’s make sure they’re the only ones who lose when this is over.

If you have any pull here — any relationship, any platform, any seat at the table — use it. Ask them to settle. WordPress is worth more than this fight.