WordPress.org Accounts Deactivated for Contributors Said to Be Planning a Fork - by Automattic CEO (techcrunch.com) 25
WordPress co-creator (and Automattic CEO) Matt Mullenweg "has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members," reports TechCrunch, "some of whom have been spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project."
Joost de Valk — creator of WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and former marketing and communications' lead for the WordPress Foundation) — last month published his "vision for a new WordPress era," alluding to a potential fork in the form of "federated and independent repositories." Karim Marucchi, CEO of enterprise web consulting firm Crowd Favorite, echoed these thoughts in a separate blog post. WP Engine indicated it was on standby to lend a corporate hand. Mullenweg, for his part, has publicly supported the notion of a new WordPress fork.
But when Automattic slashed its contributions to Wordpress.org, things heated up: This spurred de Valk to take to X.com on Friday to indicate that he was willing to lead on the next release of WordPress, with Marucchi adding that his "team stands ready." Collectively, de Valk and Marucchi contribute around 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, in a sarcasm-laden blog post published this morning, Mullenweg said that to give their independent effort the "push it needs to get off the ground," he was deactivating their WordPress.org accounts. "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.
At the same time, Mullenweg also revealed he was deactivating the accounts of three other people, with little explanation given: Sé Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it's worth noting, is president and CEO of a newly established non-profit called the WP Community Collective, which is setting out to serve as a "neutral home for collaboration, contribution, and resources" around WordPress and the broader open source ecosystem. Burns, a former contributor to the WordPress project, took to X this morning to express surprise at her deactivation, noting that she hadn't been involved in the project since 2020...
It's worth noting that deactivating a WordPress.org account prevents affected users from contributing through that channel, be it to the core project or any other plugins or themes they may be involved with.
Rand-Hendriksen posted on BlueSky: So why is he targeting Heather and me? Because we started talking about the need for proper governance, accountability, conflict of interest policies, and other things back in 2017. We both left the project in 2019, and apparently he still holds a grudge.
And while Mullenweg headlined his blog post "Joost/Karim Fork," Rand-Hendriksen wrote on BlueSky "there is no fork in the works as far as I know. He made that up, as he has done before. Heather and I have no involvement with any of this so I don't know why he grouped the five of us together like this. It smells like attempted harassment."
Later Rand-Hendriksen claimed "this is not the first time he's accused critics of forking WordPress" and that he's "convinced any fork will fail... I think he thinks saying someone is forking WordPress is an epic burn that discredits them in the eyes of the community."
But when Automattic slashed its contributions to Wordpress.org, things heated up: This spurred de Valk to take to X.com on Friday to indicate that he was willing to lead on the next release of WordPress, with Marucchi adding that his "team stands ready." Collectively, de Valk and Marucchi contribute around 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, in a sarcasm-laden blog post published this morning, Mullenweg said that to give their independent effort the "push it needs to get off the ground," he was deactivating their WordPress.org accounts. "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.
At the same time, Mullenweg also revealed he was deactivating the accounts of three other people, with little explanation given: Sé Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it's worth noting, is president and CEO of a newly established non-profit called the WP Community Collective, which is setting out to serve as a "neutral home for collaboration, contribution, and resources" around WordPress and the broader open source ecosystem. Burns, a former contributor to the WordPress project, took to X this morning to express surprise at her deactivation, noting that she hadn't been involved in the project since 2020...
It's worth noting that deactivating a WordPress.org account prevents affected users from contributing through that channel, be it to the core project or any other plugins or themes they may be involved with.
Rand-Hendriksen posted on BlueSky: So why is he targeting Heather and me? Because we started talking about the need for proper governance, accountability, conflict of interest policies, and other things back in 2017. We both left the project in 2019, and apparently he still holds a grudge.
And while Mullenweg headlined his blog post "Joost/Karim Fork," Rand-Hendriksen wrote on BlueSky "there is no fork in the works as far as I know. He made that up, as he has done before. Heather and I have no involvement with any of this so I don't know why he grouped the five of us together like this. It smells like attempted harassment."
Later Rand-Hendriksen claimed "this is not the first time he's accused critics of forking WordPress" and that he's "convinced any fork will fail... I think he thinks saying someone is forking WordPress is an epic burn that discredits them in the eyes of the community."
Simple: Matt Mullenweg is a tyrant (Score:3)
Obviously the Auttomatic lead is a tyrant. Who had a successful software project completely by accident by being in the right time and place, And who deserves about zero of the success they got.
Re: (Score:3)
So if they do fork Wordpress, I humbly suggest that the default website byline on the fork get switched from "just another Wordpress site" to "Sic semper tyrannis [wikipedia.org]".
Re: (Score:1)
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He self-described as a 'benevolent dictator'. Seems he's becoming more a greedy, possessive control freak.
I've heard this story; girl spills her guts, her man won't let her have friends, calls her if she's a minute late home from work, wants her checks in his account, and if she opposes him he escalates.
Eventually (maybe tomorrow?) Mullenweg will resort to physical violence. In this situation that's lawsuits and overt harm done to his adversaries, real or imagined.
Sad. I've never been closer to changing CMS
Time to fork just out of principle? (Score:3)
Because it sounds like this guy is losing it. I am reminded of other principal maintainers that decided to sabotage their projects to make a statement.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/... [theverge.com]
With that said though, maybe it's time for people to move on from WordPress and leave all that PHP behind them...
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With that said though, maybe it's time for people to move on from WordPress and leave all that PHP behind them...
So what widely-used web CMSes aren't based on PHP?
Re: Time to fork just out of principle? (Score:1)
Well, ChatGPT reports these:
JavaScript: Sanity, Strapi, Ghost, Contentful, Netlify CMs
Python: Django CMS, Wagtail, Pione
Ruby: Refinery CMS, Radiant CMS, Jekyll
Java: Magnolia, dotCMS, Alfresco
C#/.NET: Umbraco, Sitecore, Kentico
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I suspect you didn't include the qualifier "widely used".
Re: Time to fork just out of principle? (Score:2)
I did, but itâ(TM)s ChatGPT and I donâ(TM)t work with CMSs, so who knows?
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That's the strongest argument for PHP I've seen since 2002...
Re: Time to fork just out of principle? (Score:2)
Django is nice, but the project is a hell of deprecated functionality and orphaned requirements. It's a "run to stand still" kind of slavery.
Alfresco seemed pretty nice when I last like at it like 5-10 years ago. It'd make a nice headless CMS for delivering content to an app, a web site, a printer...
I think that seeing WordPress as a CMS is...not apt. It's the back end and the front end of a web site (at least in my single site implementation; not sure about the big installations). A better name might be a
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Unbraco is fairly widely used, has a decent set of features and is not PHP based.
Re: Time to fork just out of principle? (Score:3)
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Speaking from personal experience... if you already know perl, you can probably hack at existing PHP scripts without much extra effort.
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That's essentially why PHP 'won' in terms of market share. It was easier to use than perl and didn't come burdened by a culture that glorified incomprehensible one-liners. Apache + modphp made setup and deployment trivial, a example competitors would do well to follow.
For all the shit it gets from the peanut gallery, PHP earned its place by being better at its niche than the competition.
It has its problems, sure, but a lot of those come from features demanded by people who insisted on trying to write apps
*Gets Popcorn* (Score:3)
In the end there are going to be too many commercial users relying on too many commercial providers for anyone to change. If Mullenweg isn't outed by everyone else, then it's just going to get worse.
The biggest thing I hear from WP users is "our site is too large and too integrated to flip at this point".
Re: *Gets Popcorn* (Score:2)
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I am not sure there -IS- a path to oust him. Or even limit his sabotage. It appears he has co-opted it as his own private fiefdom. He may call himself CEO, but there is no board or anyone else to rein him in or kick him out. Its a dictatorship. It looks like as he loses it and goes down the tubes, so does the project.
Who would choose Wordpress now? (Score:2)
Fortunately I have no need for such a thing, but if I did I certainly wouldn't choose a system in this kind of mess.
Matt Mullenweg needs to be sucked into a videogame (Score:1)
Committed (Score:3)
When she gets on to the "Grand Meetup" in part two, it's like every single marker of a cult on full display you would think possible.
Regardless of your opinions of the software, tyrants like him shouldn't be encoruaged to marshall open-source software with the intent of hurting others and for their own exclusive gain.
Man (Score:2)
Mullen'wang' really is a dickless little cunt, isn't he?
Just stop using WordPress, and more specifically, stop using WordPress.com. There are other, better blogging and content management systems. There are better web hosts.