WordPress Community in Turmoil: The Latest Developments
In a surprising move, Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has deactivated several WordPress.org accounts, including those of prominent community members. This decision came amid tensions surrounding the governance of WordPress and discussions about creating a new “fork” of the open-source project. The controversy began in September when Mullenweg criticized WP Engine, a commercial hosting company built on WordPress, for allegedly profiting without contributing back to the community.
- WP Engine responded with a lawsuit after being banned from accessing essential WordPress resources.
- The court later ordered WordPress to restore access to these resources.
- Amidst this, Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi proposed “federated and independent repositories” instead of a fork.
- Mullenweg has shown support for a new fork, though de Valk and Marucchi clarify they sought “mirrors” for themes and plugins.
“Just having mirrors of WordPress.org also doesn’t really solve the problem of a single party controlling our single update server,” de Valk wrote. “For that, we need to make sure that those mirrors federate with each other and share each other’s data.”
{Joost de Valk}
Recently, Automattic announced it would align its contributions to the core WordPress project with WP Engine’s contributions in terms of hours. This prompted de Valk to express his willingness to lead the next WordPress release, supported by Marucchi’s team. Collectively, they contribute ten hours weekly to various aspects of the project.
However, in a recent blog post filled with sarcasm, Mullenweg stated he was deactivating their accounts to give their independent efforts the “push” they needed. He encouraged those interested in alternative leadership models to align with WP Engine.
“I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort,” Mullenweg wrote.
{Matt Mullenweg}
Mullenweg also deactivated accounts of other community figures like Sé Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed leads a new non-profit aiming to foster collaboration in the open-source ecosystem. Burns was surprised by her deactivation as she hadn’t contributed since 2020. Rand-Hendriksen suggested their prior criticism of WordPress governance might have led to this action.
“So why is he [Mullenweg] targeting Heather and me? Because we started talking about the need for proper governance…back in 2017,” Rand-Hendriksen shared.
{Morten Rand-Hendriksen}
While deactivating accounts restricts contributions through WordPress.org, code remains accessible on GitHub for anyone wishing to fork it. In what seemed a playful jab, Mullenweg suggested naming any new fork “JKPress” and even proposed a joint summit next year. He emphasized that open source allows for innovation without needing permission, expressing genuine curiosity about how these new ideas might unfold.
“The beauty of open source is they can take all of the GPL code in WordPress and ship their vision…If they create something that’s awesome, we may even merge it back into WordPress,” Mullenweg remarked.
{Matt Mullenweg}
