Forking the code is easy, forking the infrastructure and community not so much. It would be a lot of work and with an apparently capricious founder any splinter project has a high likelihood of getting bogged down in drama. My guess is no code fork gets traction, business continues mostly as usual but the supporting service providers and dev ecosystem start moving to alternatives that have more stable governance. Eventually this means the de facto death of WP as a brand and technology.
This is all avoidable if Matt can restore confidence in WP's governance and give the community a sense of a positive vision for the future. That would probably have the side effect of being financially beneficial to Automattic and bring WPEngine into the major contributor fold.
I'm not sure how likely the good version of this is but for everyone's sake I hope WP ends up with some kind of positive resolution.
Look what happened to freenode: everyone just migrated to exactly the same thing but without the crazy guy or the trademark. WPEngine could fork WordPress, call it WPEngine, they're probably already halfway done scraping the plugin repository.
I think there's a realistic future where Matt steps away and things go back to being okay. As we've learned, the Foundation is intrinsically integrated with himself and Automattic. And the backdoors they have into authentication and plugins and etc are deeper than we expected.
Matt would basically have to sell the company and the only buyer would be... cough cough ... private equity!
> the Foundation is intrinsically integrated with himself and Automattic
Don't you think Matt could de-integrate himself[1] with and achieve proper governance[2] of the Foundation, while retaining control of Automattic? I don't see the issue, there.
1. I think having Matt as a part of a properly-governed Foundation would be best.
2. "Proper governance" meaning one person can't go apeshit and single-handedly do crazy stuff like what has been happening.
Again, I can only go from what I have read elsewhere in this mess (and Matt making the governance of the Foundation clear as mud doesn't help), but my understanding is that the Foundation is essentially staffed and directed by Automattic employees.
If they could hand it over to an independent board and reassign leadership duties, maybe?
I think it'd best to just stay. I see one of two likely things happening:
1. Matt comes to his senses and formally secedes his control of the WordPress Foundation and WordPress OSS to a qualified group of people.
2. He doesn't and the project gets forked to something that gets traction and will be immediately compatible.