Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork

I haven’t followed this whole controversy closely but I don’t see a problem with this personally. It’s aggressive but this person spent most of their life building Wordpress to what it is, giving it dedicated focus for a couple decades. Why should WPEngine or others get to suck up the money from that?

Mullenweg is a cuckoo. He did not create Wordpress and yet has managed to closely associate the product with his own persona and ever since has spent most of his life wringing money out of Wordpress.

He is now annoyed that someone else has been better at extracting profit from something that - going by what he says - he sees as his personal fiefdom.

I really dislike WP Engine because they ruined Flywheel, one of the best companies I’ve ever dealt with (and to which I paid tens of thousands of dollars over my lifetime as a customer of Flywheel).

But Mullenweg is coming off as completely unhinged.

> Mullenweg is a cuckoo. He did not create Wordpress and yet has managed to closely associate the product with his own persona and ever since has spent most of his life wringing money out of Wordpress.

The dude literally one of the top-ever contributors to WordPress. He's number 6 on the GitHub contributor graph with over 1000 commits. Him and Mark Little started WordPress. He's also the person who has funded most of the development either via his own private company or via Automattic.

> He is now annoyed that someone else has been better at extracting profit from something that - going by what he says - he sees as his personal fiefdom.

Another falsehood. Automattic makes more money than WP Engine. He's basically trying to force them to either contribute to WordPress to to pay Automattic. This latest move seems like a move to force WP Engine to fund a fork or help fund development of WordPress.

> Him and Mark Little started WordPress

Nit: Mike Little was the other cofounder - you might be confusing him with Mark Jaquith, one of the lead developers and largest contributors early in the project.

Also, with regards to contribution count, it’s important to look at “props” which are the credits given for commits. WordPress has a contribution system that predates things like git’s multiple author support, so users are given props via commit messages, and a system tracks this for attributing credit for each release.