PieFedMatt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork
techcrunch.com/2025/01/11/matt-mullenweg-deacti…
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I know of no faster way to relegate your project to the dustbin of history.
It happened with X. XFree86 was the graphics system you used on Linux. One developer had constant friction with the core XFree86 people, but he was also a guy who kept coming up with good and innovative ideas and making them happen, and had a lot of respect from the wider community, and so for a long time there was this uneasy tension. Finally, things came to a head:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/dispute-divides-key-open-source-group/
I think it took about *a week* after that before Keith was leading a new core group of developers and sensible people, and everyone was simply totally ignoring XFree86. All the distributions switched to Keith's fork, xorg, which they continued to use for about 15 years, until Wayland came along.
It stands alongside Larry McVoy telling the Linux developers they needed to jump through hoops to use his version control system, because they had no alternative, in the absolute hall of fame of completely unforced own-goals that changed the landscape of software in ways that are still felt today.
Edit: Typo
McVoy first blustered and threatened, but ultimately chose to go home and take his ball with him: he withdrew permission for gratis use by free software projects, and Linux developers will move to other software.
If I remember it right, he did a lot more than that. He tried to say that *one* particular kernel developer who he viewed as disobedient to him would be punished by no longer being allowed to use the software. When people pointed out that this behavior was insane and would cause significant disruption to the project, he didn't care. Then, they made the absolutely predictable choice to abandon him. *Then* he took his ball and went home, after everyone had already moved to a nearby park and started a new game without him.
I might be misremembering, but that's how I remember it happening. Instead of using git, we could all be using BitKeeper, and paying McVoy our $5/month or whatever for the privilege, because it was just as much better than everything else as git is now. But he didn't want that, if it involved not having everything *exactly* the way he wanted it.
Deactivating Wordpress contributor accounts does not prevent any forks. I don't get what the benefit is to ban them. Is it just to demonstrate his power?
If WP Engine contributed nothing, then why steal their custom fields plugin?
🤔
Real issues and contributions aside; creating one plugin is not contributing to Wordpress core/itself. And if they make good money over many years, I would agree that that alone is not a proportional or very significant contribution.
The plugin was evidently significant. But doesn't necessarily indicate overall contributions or proportionality.
Why is this guy being such a weenie?
This is what happens when you feel *ownership* over a *community.*
He thinks "I built this community" and to an extent he's correct, but as with the nature of communities, it doesn't matter if *he* helped build it, the community is *by definition* made up of the people of the community... not just the guy who spearheaded things way back in the day. Especially something like an open source project, if he wanted this level of control he should have kept it closed source.
If you think you *own* your community, you're in for a bad time.
“But I’m just a narcissist, I’m what matters here. You must worship me, why don’t you? I’ll cut off your legs.”
He's actually cutting off his own legs and soon he'll be dancing on pegs.
He dances for nickels
When you want to build a cult of personality and accidentally build a flourishing diverse community lol
They weren't even planning to create a fork.
Matt said his company was going to all but stop contributing to WordPress for now out of spite against WPEngine https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-sponsored-contributions-to-wordpress/
These people said "OK we'll take responsibility for the next release within the current WordPress organization framework so that work can continue"
Matt said nuh-nuh, no you aren't https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
Basically Matt interpreted their "we're going to take over work within Wordpress since Matt abandoned it" as "we're taking over Wordpress from Matt" and is telling them through some tortured rhetoric "you aren't Wordpress, I'm Wordpress, you go do it in a fork instead"
Holy shit, the amount of pure *seethe* in the jkpress post could power a small city.
The more of Mullenweg's posts and such that I read, the more he comes across as someone that took some professional/business writing classes and thinks that just because he's using business speak conventions it means that he's *not* coming across as a massive petulant child.
It's a shame, because he does have some valid points it seems: that the proper existing process wasn't followed for offering to take the lead, and questioning security and sanity controls in a distributed theme/plugin system.
But it's buried so deep in barely concealed shitslinging that it's nearly impossible to take seriously.
He certainly seems to be labouring under the mistaken impression that he's a business genius.
Man, this meltdown just keeps fucking going, doesn't it. Every time I think Mullenweg has finally settled down, he does something else incredibly dumb.
Sad part is that he's likely to get away with this pne since it's not effecting a company with enough money to make it a legal battle.
This will not kill Wordpress outright but it might very well significantly factor into the decision of every future person deciding if they should write a plugin to support Wordpress or some alternative CMS or if they should host a Wordpress instance or something else, especially companies offering commercial hosting.
It might even lead to a project or two that will eventually replace Wordpress in its dominant position.
I feel like a lot of people using WordPress solely for blogging can transfer to Jekyll or Hugo, and lose nothing. There's a setup process involved, but you can't get hacked with static pages.
For the rest there's always the far more top-heavy Drupal.
Classic Press is a fork of WordPress that leaves out Gutenberg and has all the legacy PHP < 7.4 stuff stripped out. It's nice.
https://www.classicpress.net/
It's not the same but laravel is a neat dev platform as well. Lots of community made libraries and relatively drama free.
I program a lot with both wp and laravel over the last years. Not sure what I want to say other than they are cool but different vibes and skills.
Wp can be used out in the box by almost anyone who is web savvy; laravel is always needing some assembly, at the least, so the entry there is programming or deep pockets to pay that.
Wp community and sites is probably a thousand times larger than laravel?
Huh, this actually looks very promising.
WPE is already in legal battle with him, isn't it?
affecting
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Starfleet Intelligence
Sounds like a spoiled child
Trump's disease is spreading.
Can someone remove this asshole?
It's more likely that a fork becomes dominant, making him irrelevant. That's *almost* the same thing.
That's better, because he would have to live his life knowing he completely fucked himself.
Do you think he has enough self-awareness?
Hell no. Can’t wait to hear about his new Wordpress cryptocurrency launching soon
Well, other people would know that. He himself would know that it was "those people" that fucked him over, and not he himself.
True!
Please don't, this is the best entertainment I've had in months!
So, someone else forks it and then the contributors just fork that one. This is dumb gate keeping when there are other gates readily available nearby.
Pretty sure no one told this guy how FOSS is supposed to work or what licensing even means.
Best case scenario here he’s basically asking for is that the open source community forks this to a new project, stops contributing at all to the official one and since he’s announced he will literally have one developer work on this (45hrs per week, down from 4000 supposedly), the new fork becomes the defacto standard and his company is left peddling old wares full of bugs and exploits no one wants.
I think he misunderstands the label/title “benevolent dictator for life” that can get assigned to people on some really popular open source projects.
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Humans can't do then benevolent part for very long.
You can fake it for a bit, but by and large we're just absolutely shit at not being assholes to each other once you get outside of your family tribe or maybe your local neighbors.
(Also having a complete mental breakdown doesn't help, and boy howdy.)
just filing this away...
.. t.. u.. v.. w.. x.. woops. back up.
w.
there we go.
right before xfree86 in the file of forgotten projects that fucked-up big, and lost.
I'm about to look this up, I better not be disappointed with how they bombed their own project ....
Edit: that did not disappoint
My dislike of Wordpress is being validated every day
Wonder how pissy he’s gonna be when the project is forked and everyone leaves the original.
159 have left since Matt's cheese slide off his cracker
https://slashdot.org/story/24/10/04/1355253/159-employees-leave-automattic-as-wordpress-ceo-escalates-fight-with-wp-engine
remember when matt publically attacked a trans woman on twitter because she called him out about his transphobia
I do not, source?
Not that I don’t believe you, but if we’re gonna hate on this guy even more, we should make sure it’s for facts.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-with-trans-user-over-account-ban-revealing-private-account-names-in-the-process/
Yeah fuck that guy.
Hopefully he explodes with hammers and hammers go flying everywhere
If anyone wants to see it from the horses mouth:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=photomatt
That's him.
🕐👄
horse
That’s not how open source is sposto work…
100% switching to whatever the fork ends up being.
I don't get the logic of cutting off contributions of any kind unless they were actively sabotaging the projector something. Seems like that just makes the fork basically a guarantee. And in open source, a fork that discourages community is always going to be at a disadvantage.
So does anyone know if the fork has been implemented or not?
I can't access the link. who is he?
He's a co-creator of WordPress and (my opinion) a total knob.
With what I have now seen about him, I would be quite inclined to agree.
The original creator of Wordpress and the owner of a Wordpress hosting site. He's been having a meltdown for months because Wordpress is being used by WP Engine, a for-profit competitor hosting company, in compliance with the license. Since then, he has:
- Changed the trademark license and retroactively sued WP Engine,
- Disparaged WP Engine every time he had the chance,
- Added a potentially legally binding checkbox to wordpress.com where the user must declare their disassociation with WP Engine (which also locked out actual employees),
- Forcibly taken control of several community-made plugins,
- Acted like
an absolute fucking buffoonthe innocent little lamb who's been set upon by the wolves.Technically, WordPress started as a fork.
The sad thing is that at the beginning he had a little tiny bit of justification for not liking what WP Engine was doing.
What WP Engine was doing was completely legal. They were completely following the requirements of the WordPress license. But, it was true that they could have done more to benefit the WordPress community. Instead, they were building a huge, quarter-billion dollar business based on WordPress without either helping pay for its development or contributing meaningful code themselves.
A competent project leader could have used the goodwill they'd amassed over decades to mount a subtle pressure campaign to get WP Engine to do more. But, instead, his approach has somehow made a private equity backed for-profit company to almost appear to be the "good guy" in this fight.
An asshole
This is a guy who should have just went to vegas and bought a expensive escort for his mid life crisis.
For those who haven't been following this epic meltdown
https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=wordpress
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