Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members, some of whom have been spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project, TechCrunch reported.
While community criticism of WordPress’s governance isn’t new, the latest brouhaha kicked off back in September when Mullenweg publicly chastised WP Engine, a commercial hosting company built atop WordPress, for profiteering without giving much back. Things soon escalated, with WP Engine filing a lawsuit after it was banned from accessing key WordPress resources, and then a court ordered WordPress to restore access.
Mullenweg, for his part, has publicly supported the notion of a WordPress fork — a term that describes when someone takes the code from an open source project and creates a copy, which can take on a life of its own, with a separate community of contributors.
Earlier this week, Automattic announced it would reduce its contribution to the core WordPress open source project to align with WP Engine’s own contribution, a metric measured in weekly hours.
“I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort,” Mullenweg wrote.
Matt Mullenweg posted on WordPress:
In open source, one thing that makes it even harder to ship great software is bringing together disparate groups of contributors who may have entirely different incentives or missions or philosophies about how to make great work. Working together on a team is such a delicate balance balance, and even one person rowing in the wrong direction can throw everyone else off.
That’s why periodically I think it is very healthy for open source projects to fork, it allows for people to try out and experiment with different forms of governance, leadership, decision-making and technical approaches. As I’ve said, forking is beautiful, and forks have my full support and we’ll even link and promote them.
However, in Joost and Karim’s new project, they don’t need to follow our process or put in the hours to prove their worth within the WordPress.org ecosystem, they can just lead by example of shopping code and product to people that they can use, evaluate, and test out for themselves. If they need financial or hosting support it sounds like WP Engine wants to support their fork.
Computerworld reported: Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said his decision to reduce his team’s weekly hours working on WordPress by 99%, from 400 hours to 45 hours, was designed to pressure WP Engine to drop its lawsuit against Mullenweg and Automattic.
“They don’t actually make WordPress. They just resell it,” Mullenweg told Computerworld on Friday evening. “If what they are reselling is no longer getting all the free updates, they have less stuff to sell.”
“It doesn’t make sense for Automattic to pay people to work on all of these things,” he said. “We are under attack and we are circling the wagons. Our number one goal is for WP Engine to drop their expensive lawsuits against me and Automattic.”
In my opinion, it sounds like Matt Mullenweg is unhappy about the decision some of his employees made regarding WordPress forks.