WordPress retaliation impacts community

I've been trying to wrap my head around why this feels so wrong. If the project had been run like this from the beginning, in an opinionated way that prioritizes what the few creators of the project think are important, then that's one thing. But it seems like Wordpress has generally been the stable, boring, slow-moving project that isn't run like a personal fiefdom, and Mullenweg is trying to force it from the one model to the other. I haven't used Wordpress in years, and this drama makes me never want to use it again.

> Mullenweg is trying to force it from the one model to the other

There are proper ways to do that, changing the license in a next version for example is how I think it should have been done in the first place. I've said it before here but this has all the markings of being extremely petty and Mullenweg not happy with their own licensing model.

> changing the license in a next version

Can Matt do that though? I don't _think_ WordPress has a copyright assignment agreement for contributors? So neither Matt nor Automattic nor wordpress.org nor The WordPress Foundation can choose to re-license future versions of the GPL2 or newer codebase without agreement from _all_ the contributors who retain the copyright in their part of the code.

There is no chance the license changes. Matt has been a very, very vocal supporter of GPL.

This self-described war he’s going on is all about commercial trademarks, and other hosting companies having more commercial success than Automattic in the ecosystem while contributing fewer developers and less money to the project.

Now, he’s taken it to a very extreme extent, and I fully disagree with his approach, but the core issues (for him) have nothing to do with GPL and how the WP project is governed. Those has even the same for decades, and he’s not trying to change them.

He’s just being very self-destructed because it turns out the community has no interest in some kind of “war” that gets long term contributors locked out of the ecosystem. He was expecting more people to be on his side, and frankly now seems to be lashing out (by blocking people) when that didn’t happen

None of that means he’s trying to change the governance model or license.