Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork

This isn’t unexpected; I’ve been deactivated on Slack since very early in this dispute, and later banned from the issue tracker as well. I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.

Matt is banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made. A large group of contributors felt they had to make an anonymous statement from fear of the same retribution I suffered: https://www.therepository.email/core-contributors-voice-conc...

(I am a less active direct contributor these days, so I’m still able to contribute even while blocked - but many people’s livelihoods depend on it, as sponsored contributors.)

Honest question from an outsider. WordPress is open source, so why hasn't the project been replaced with one that doesn't include him?

WordPress is a lot more than it's core code. There's a whole ecosystem of plugins, for example, and the usual place to share them (wordpress.org/plugins) is, essentially, controlled by one guy. It's not so easy to fork that.

Then start with a new place to share plugins.