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.

The first people to take this step will most likely have their plugins stolen, just as Matt did with ACF. This means taking this step is a massive danger for the first contributors - those with the highest impact are those with the most to lose.

What do you exactly mean with „stolen“? Honest question.

Matt's company will fork your project, replace your original plugin listing and claim all your reviews as theirs, while also stopping you from distributing security updates to force people to switch to their fork.

Imagine if you make your money from selling your plugin, and Matt does this to you. Every WP plugin developer has to live in fear of this happening at any moment, and you can be certain it will happen if you show any kind of resistance towards Matt.

Yeah you mean he takes control of the plugin on WordPress.org? But if we all move to a different domain, you don't have that problem?

Only problem is that existing WP installations would need to be manually patched to the new domain name. As long as users don't do that they'll still be in Matt's control.

But yeah, can't we create some bots that scan the internet for WP sites and send the webmasters an email informing the corruption going on inside WP and the option for them to move to the new community.

If you could move all WP plugins & plugin developers to a different domain at once, sure, there's no problem! But unless you have a magic wand, this won't happen. Then the question is: can you move enough at once to clear the network effect?

If you cannot do that, every developer that moved with you potentially just lost their livelihood. That's the crux of it. There's no technical issue to solve here, it's purely a social and economical one.