Context: court filing today and first substantive response from Automattic / Matt Mullenweg in the case WP Engine filed against them.

Curious what can be said against the (correct) distinction between GPL rights for the software itself, with its uncontested written grant; and access to wordpress.org services, with AFAIK no grant.

Heh, that's some good bullshit.

They argue that wordpress.org is and always has been Matt's property and is under no obligation to provide service to anyone.

That's great, but wordpress (the software) comes hardcoded with a dependency on Matt's personal site, so this is entirely by their design. You can't have that and try to say the two aren't one and the same. It should be pretty easy to argue that Mullenweg agrees to provide service to whoever uses wordpress based on that alone. That could be removed, made flexible or any number of solutions. But it isn't.

The rest is just "we need more time".