I read the details. He has a decent reason to ask WP to pay as they got brought by private equity and significantly dropped their contributions to the WordPress which is open source and hence relies on the community to feed back into the product.

Fuuuuck

Because their core product - search, now sucks. Why? Page 1 is mostly ads. Compared to other search tools they are a much poorer user experience. Hell even Bing is better. They push their Bing chat based engine but you know what? It does a pretty good job without destroying what I came to do with the tool which is search for stuff.