WordPress.org Accounts Deactivated for Contributors Said to Be Planning a Fork - by Automattic CEO (techcrunch.com) 49
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."
Re: Automattic Mobile Plugins (AMP) (Score:2)
I expect Wordpress to slowly die now.
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gonna find the forkin forker
Who forked my forkin fork.
Rockin Rob Riley “Forklift man”
Simple: Matt Mullenweg is a tyrant (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Simple: Matt Mullenweg is a tyrant (Score:5, Funny)
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]".
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Ha, I will remember this one if we ever reach that point.
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Re:Simple: Matt Mullenweg is a tyrant (Score:5, Insightful)
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 platforms. Not interested in being impacted by this tyrant.
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He self-described as a 'benevolent dictator'. Seems he's becoming more a greedy, possessive control freak.
Yeah.. That's many famous villains in history too: made some major positive contribution early on -- became "benevolent dictators" - which is 99% a mythical concept in itself. History says there is not truly such a thing as a benevolent dictator. Benevolent dictators always ended up devolving into despots providing they stayed in power long enough -- you become despotic, or your term lapses, or you
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There were benevolent dictators. It was normally a short term, like six months, and the benevolent ones gave up power when the term ended. The other ones usually had to be killed off.
Open source types seem to have taken an office held by a guy who got stabbed to death by his friends, mashed it together with some idle musing by 19th century Englishmen and figured what could go wrong?
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There were benevolent dictators. It was normally a short term, like six months, and the benevolent ones gave up power
I don't disagree that temporary dictators can have turned out to be benevolent for a brief term of office. It's when people remain in power for years or work on getting their term made into a forever term that they absolutely turn.
And bear in mind they often try to hide it. Ultimately a dictator's benevolence is to be judged by their dissenters and the governed, anyway. A way of instant
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Many organizations run just fine with dictators for life or the equivalent. Most private corporations and a number of public ones for example. Families. Criminal organizations. Organized religions, typically. Other types of monarchies.
If you don't like the stabbing mechanism then you need to include another means of removing them. Open Source has forking, which is undoubtedly what's going to happen here when they stop being dramatic. It would be fun if they put on togas and made some speeches in the Automat
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Thus the intelligent decision of modern republics to maintain mandatory term limitations and new elections.
Let alone "modern republics", the term "dictator" originated from the ancient Roman dictator, which was at first a magistrate being granted temporary full authority to resolve a specific issue. The office also was still subject to oversight from the Senate.
The negative connotation of the term used today originated from Sulla first and Julius Caesar later, which abused the original concept to become "dictators" with full authority but without the balances of limited time, scope and Senate oversight.
TL;DR: Th
Obligatory Misquote (Score:2)
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?
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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?
Re: Time to fork just out of principle? (Score:1)
If your condition for "widely used" is "comparable to WP" then nothing on the web is widely used except WP.
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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
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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?
None, really.
Alternative php based ones, OTOH, would be Joomla and Drupal.
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Yup, that was why I said what I did. People can go ahead and consider moving on from Wordpress, as long as they're cognizant of the real issues with Drupal / Joomla / etc. - none of these platforms is perfect. But trying to get away from PHP altogether opens up a whole new can of worms.
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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...
I would say a straight-up fork that maintains look and feel plus compatibility with existing plugins has a much greater chance of success here.
It doesn't necessarily matter whether the core is written in PHP, But people have their websites built on top of certain Plugins and Themes which are based on the existing codebase.
A rewrite in a new language that maintained compatibility with those plug
*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.
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They're not lying. They've cobbled together an impossibly complex mess of wordpress plugins and an equally complex mess of (mostly manual) procedures to keep basic operations running. They think that wordpress is "easier" than other things, and their setup is mind-numbingly complex, so they're terrified to change.
Consider yourself lucky that you're not working on a migration. I'll never agree to one of those again. It's an absolute nightmare. Some plugins leverage ill-considered features of wordpress,
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.
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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.
You "have no need for such a thing", therefore you aren't familiar with the problem space.
Either WordPress or a fork will remain dominant. I am hoping for a fork ...
Matt Mullenweg needs to be sucked into a videogame (Score:1)
Committed (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Just one more reason.... (Score:3)
...to fork it.
It's like grandma always said.... If the person in charge is an intolerable cunt, move on and make your own.... that's not exactly how she said it, but it's close enough. ;-)
I'm forking Slashdot (Score:2)
But we're keeping the feature that prevents new sign ups.
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Also, please don't fix the Unicode non-support... it just wouldn't seem like Slashdot if we couldn't tell at a glance when someone's posted from their iPhone!
Forks (Score:2)
Not all forks are the same, for example Oracle forked RHEL and I won't touch that fork even with a 10 feet pole, Alma Linux also forked RHEL and I do use that in production. What matters is *who* and *why* is doing the fork. And from what I am seeing so far, my perception is WP Engine is the equivalent of Oracle here.