Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and co-creator of WordPress, has deactivated the accounts of several members of the WordPress.org community. Some of its members were spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project.
Community criticism of WordPress governance is not new, but the latest uproar comes in September, when Mullenweg publicly accused WP Engine, a commercial hosting company built on WordPress, of profiteering without giving much in return. It started with an accusation. Things quickly escalated (read more here) and after WP Engine was banned from accessing key WordPress resources, we filed a lawsuit and a court subsequently ordered WordPress to restore access.
Key figures from the broader WordPress community are coming forward. Last month, Joost de Valk — creator of the WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (former head of marketing and communications at the WordPress Foundation) — announced his “vision for a new WordPress era,” and announced a new approach in the form of “federation.” hinted at a possible divergence. and an independent repository. ” Karim Marucci, CEO of enterprise web consulting firm Crowd Favorite, echoed similar thoughts in another blog post.
WP Engine has indicated that it is standing by to lend a hand to businesses.
Mullenweg has publicly supported the concept of new WordPress forks. This is a term used to describe someone taking code from an open source project and creating a copy that can take on a life of its own in another community. of contributors. (It is also possible to merge such contributions back into the original project.)
branch out
Earlier this week, Automattic announced that it would be reducing its contributions to the core WordPress open source project to align with WP Engine's own contributions, a metric measured in weekly hours. This spurred De Valk to tell X on Friday that he would be leading the next release of WordPress, with Marucci adding, “The team is ready.”
Together, de Valk and Marucchi contribute about 10 hours a week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. But in a tongue-in-cheek blog post published this morning, Mullenweg said they would deactivate their WordPress.org accounts to give their independent efforts “the push they need to get off the ground.” .
“I highly encourage anyone who wants to experiment with different leadership models or want to work with WP Engine to join the new initiative,” Mullenweg wrote.
At the same time, Mullenweg also revealed that he had deactivated the accounts of three other people: Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Lund-Hendriksen, but offered little explanation. It's worth noting that Mr. Reed is the president and CEO of a newly formed nonprofit organization called WP Community Collective. The nonprofit aims to serve as a “neutral hub for collaboration, contributions, and resources” around WordPress and the broader open source ecosystem. .
Burns, a former contributor to the WordPress project, expressed surprise to X this morning at her deactivation, noting that she had not been involved with the project since 2020. Regarding the Blue Sky, Lando Hendricksen suggested Mullenweg may be targeting him. Burns is citing previous opposition to WordPress governance. He wrote:
So why did he [Mullenweg] Are you targeting Heather and me? Because we started talking in 2017 about the need for good governance, accountability, conflict of interest policies, etc. We both left the project in 2019, but apparently he still holds a grudge.
Deactivating a WordPress.org account means that affected users will no longer be able to post through that channel, whether it's the core project or any other plugins or themes they may be involved with. Please be careful. However, it is also hosted on GitHub, so anyone can fork the project.
In a seemingly tongue-in-cheek suggestion, Mullenweg said that any new fork could be called “JKPress” and that next year they might host a joint “WordPress + JKPress Summit.”
“Joost and Karim have a lot of bold and interesting ideas, and I really want to see how they come to fruition,” Mullenweg added. “The beauty of open source is that we can bring all our GPL code into WordPress and realize our vision. We don't need permission, we just do something. Sometimes we merge it back into WordPress. The ability to move code and ideas freely between projects is part of what makes open source a driving force for innovation.”