Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork

> This post was updated to clarify that de Valk and Marucchi haven’t specifically said they have planned a fork, and that they were hoping to create mirrors for the plugins and themes repositories, while also offering to lead on the next release of WordPress.

The plan was to scrape the site and set up an alternative, not to fork Wordpress. The headline was deliberately written to deceive.

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edit: that being said, a distributed model would be best for all situations like this. I still can't get over the fact that Rust has a github dependency. And I'm sure they're not the only one.

https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/326

Messy Wordpress drama is messy Wordpress drama though, and that’s the problem, whatever the truth of one or another story.

Have I unflinchingly recommends Wordpress to dozens of people over the years? Yes.

Have they gone ahead and used it? Yes.

Have I helped them get set up? Yes.

Was it worth staking a little bit of my reputation on Wordpress saying “this will just work, and when it doesn’t there are loads of people who can help”? Yes.

Will I continue to do that when there is this insane level of Mullenweg-induced teenage-boy-angst highschool drama surrounding Wordpress? Hell no.

And that’s the problem. This nonsense kills the community goodwill around the software. And that’s really really sad, and all of Mullenweg’s making because his ego has run away with itself.

It must be really tough being a “software celebrity” for your entire adult life. But it seems like his psyche has got stuck when he got “famous”.

You see this with kids in bands who get too rich, too famous, too fast - and the fallout is similar: destroy everything in a bonfire of vanity.

this. Wordpress was already in a precarious situaton with alternatives like squarespace and wix etc..

Wordpress was useful, because lots of people know it well enough. When your consultant can't be reached someone else can take it over and do ok. I even liked the Gutenberg page layout tool.

>It must be really tough being a “software celebrity” for your entire adult l ife.

I imagine it is hard. He didn't make the fortunes of others, but he had a pretty loyal and really nice community. One of the best. Its what made wordpress grow and be so successful.

As a wordpress professional said at a recent meetup, its hard to recommend wordpress, when you know the client will Google it an all this nonsense comes up.

Wow, 2016, thanks for that.

I’ll add this gripe from Bunnie of Novena/Precursor/et.al. fame, explaining how he is mulling over freezing the rust version (in fact the xous OS repo has a fork of rust in order to build against something stable), from the most recent update on crowdsupply [0]

The Rust project used to care about Windows as a target, so this work-around feels like a bit of a middle finger to Windows users. Lately, I have been feeling like Rust (and llvm) is giving the middle finger to everything that’s not POSIX x86_64 running in a FAANG-scale cloud environment; they don’t worry about software supply chain security because they are the software supply chain, and of course they trust their own tools. I suppose they are entitled to do that, given who funds their payroll, but it’s not a good omen for projects like ours.

[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates...

Absolutely that. I now have people in my network, friends, the guy who runs the car washing service, my greengrocer, a friend who is a personal trainer, people like that - not remotely technical but who have Wordpress sites - who are saying “is Wordpress dead then?” because the drama is bleeding out.

Wordpress is going to become Twitter.

And that harms the hundreds of developers who have built really good single person dev shops, or a handful of people working and being paid well to develop on Wordpress.

All because someone’s ego got bent.

April 2016, damn, that's 2 full years before Microsoft acquired GitHub!