Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork

People who don’t support forking don’t actually support the concept of open source/free software.

Forking is essential.

Exactly.

No one should care if matt is unpleasant when they can just fork and be done with him.

That disregards the value and recognition of the Wordpress brand beyond people who understand the concept of forking.

The problem is that the tens of thousands of small businesses who placed their trust in Wordpress will be damaged by this. I know - anecdotally - that many of those people like Wordpress “because it is free” (like both beer and speech) and because they know - even fuzzily - that because of that there’s lots of cool useful stuff that is available.

Now, sure, a lot of that cool useful stuff will still work with a fork. But it splits the message and gradually - not overnight - people developing that cool and useful stuff may lose faith and do something else.

What Millenweg is doing hits at the very heart of what open source means - and what community means - and is, as far as I can see, an absolutely cynical move made in the pursuit of profit and vanity.

I agree with you.

I run a business that is invested in the WordPress ecosystem.

It’s going to be a non-trivial endeavor to get a fork seriously running and reliably delivered.

In the meantime the community has to suffer this clown’s further antics.

Get the support of Cpanel for the fork and it will replace Wordpress. Cpanel powers a significant amount of Wordpress sites, possibly even the majority of them.

Not in wordPress land, where the GPL is ignored and selling the software itself is a big chunk of a lot of peoples' business models.

I spent about a decade working with WP and wrote a lot of code for it, and had to read way more folks' code than I care to think about.

It's unique compared to other stacks I have worked with in that unlike ruby, python, node, or even Drupal, lots of businesses are often making money by selling submodules... which is strange because they are basically selling GPL code for a GPL'd stack.

In an environment like that, folks bristle at the suggestion of "forking" and will accuse folks of "stealing". WP.org has more or less endorsed that view.

I find it a bit nutty, but hey they all think I'm a crank. Maybe I am. Personally, I just made money fixing weird bugs that arose from that pile of cruft, or writing bespoke plugins for very niche purposes. It wasn't fun, but I got very good at dumb stuff for sure- it has some real problems but if it does what you want it's very easy to turn over to the marketing department.

There are plenty of contradictions in that anti-GPL point of view which can be seen in the fact that WP itself is a fork of an earlier project and it's main ecommerce setup was forked as well. But folks generally see what the want to see, I think.

Yeah the community is a big part of it. But if the core of the community is corrupt and you can't do anything about it, maybe it's not such a bad idea to build up a new more healthy community?

Yes it takes time and effort etc, but wouldn't it be worth it?

I at least would not find it worth any of my time to contribute anything that has anything to do with the WordPress.org domain.

That’s exactly my point though - Mullenweg’s impact on Wordpress is toxic both to the community of users, and the community of contributors.

That is a fantastic idea. That and probably Plesk.

We built our own hosting platform that is vendor agnostic, but we’d happily support these larger platform oriented players as a matter of open source collaboration.

In the meantime, I’m looking for an alternative to my journaling app, Day One, which sadly was acquired by Automattic a few years ago and shoved into their mostly languishing “Cosmos” (stuff not WordPress related) team. That’s been a long time coming though. They introduce feature regressions a lot and don’t really “do” feedback.

I was flabbergasted when a friend introduced me to WP's ideas of "GPLs" and "nulled plugins", which is to say, by the community's description, someone other than the author distributed GPL-licensed WP plugins without charging for them.

Uh, what? Yes, that's how the license those authors chose for their code works. The other people aren't "thieves" for redistributing it.

Other people reading this, check out https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1ghc2o6/gpl_clar... for a representative example of odd discussions on the subject.