@pthane TLDR is that one of the original authors of #Wordpress, who himself owns one of the big Wordpress hosting sites, tried to strong arm other wordpress hosting sites into paying him money. The noise has died down, so I imagine he failed.
As a software snob I consider Wordpress poorly engineered and ludicrously over-complex for running a blog; from a technical point of view there are hundreds of better solutions. But it is well known and user friendly.