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.
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/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.
WPE is already in legal battle with him, isn’t it?
affecting
They weren’t even planning to create a fork.
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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/
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These people said “OK we’ll take responsibility for the next release within the current WordPress organization framework so that work can continue”
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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.
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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.
Sounds like a spoiled child
Trump’s disease is spreading.
That’s not how open source is sposto work…
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!
My dislike of Wordpress is being validated every day
Why are you hating on WordPress ?
See the article
But why WordPress itself
Bad impression of their development environment and business practices
100% switching to whatever the fork ends up being.
I think he misunderstands the label/title “benevolent dictator for life” that can get assigned to people on some really popular open source projects.
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.
xfree86
I’m about to look this up, I better not be disappointed with how they bombed their own project …
Edit: that did not disappoint
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
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.
As if people didn’t Clone Wordpress already, let’s call it BlogPrint
🍿
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.
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.
