{"id":10301,"date":"2025-01-12T11:05:30","date_gmt":"2025-01-12T18:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/?p=10301"},"modified":"2025-01-12T11:05:41","modified_gmt":"2025-01-12T18:05:41","slug":"matt-mullenweg-deactivates-wordpress-contributor-accounts-over-alleged-fork-plans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/2025\/01\/12\/matt-mullenweg-deactivates-wordpress-contributor-accounts-over-alleged-fork-plans\/","title":{"rendered":"Matt Mullenweg Deactivates WordPress Contributor Accounts Over Alleged Fork Plans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The spat between Automattic and WP Engine expands. I have a previous post<\/a> with a little background about this $7.5 billion dollar company Automattic with a good opinion piece.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/01\/11\/matt-mullenweg-deactivates-wordpress-accounts-of-contributors-planning-a-fork\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

By Paul Sawers<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg<\/a> has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members, two of whom he says planned to spearhead a new fork of the open source WordPress project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

While community criticism of WordPress\u2019s governance isn\u2019t new, the latest brouhaha kicked off back in September when Mullenweg publicly chastised<\/a> WP Engine, a commercial hosting company built atop WordPress, for profiteering without giving much back. Things soon escalated (read all about it here<\/a>), with WP Engine filing a lawsuit<\/a> after it was banned<\/a> from accessing key WordPress resources, and then a court ordered WordPress to restore access<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In amongst all this, key figures from within the wider WordPress community have stepped forward. Joost de Valk<\/a> \u2014 creator of WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and former<\/a> marketing and communications\u2019 lead for the WordPress Foundation) \u2014 last month published his \u201cvision for a new WordPress era,\u201d<\/a> where he discussed the potential for \u201cfederated and independent repositories.\u201d Karim Marucchi<\/a>, CEO of enterprise web consulting firm Crowd Favorite, echoed similar thoughts in a separate blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WP Engine, meanwhile, indicated it was on standby<\/a> to lend a corporate hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mullenweg, for his part, has publicly supported the notion<\/a> of a new WordPress fork \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a sarcasm-laden blog post<\/a> published this morning, Mullenweg refers to de Valk and Marucchi\u2019s plans as a \u201cfork,\u201d though the duo haven\u2019t announced any such plans \u2014 de Valk, did, however, discuss the notion of creating federated \u201cmirrors\u201d (a repository copy) for themes and plugins, among other changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJust having mirrors of WordPress.org also doesn\u2019t really solve the problem of a single party controlling our single update server,\u201d de Valk wrote in his post last month. \u201cFor that, we need to make sure that those mirrors federate with each other, and share each others data and\u2026.allow for independent themes and plugins to be hosted there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a statement sent to TechCrunch, de Valk reiterated that at no point were they planning to fork WordPress, with Marucchi conveying the same message on X<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Get forked<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Earlier this week, Automattic announced<\/a> it would reduce its contribution to the core WordPress open source project to align with WP Engine\u2019s own contribution, a metric measured in weekly hours. This spurred de Valk to take to X<\/a> on Friday to indicate that he was willing to lead on the next release of WordPress, with Marucchi adding that his \u201cteam stands ready<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collectively, de Valk<\/a> and Marucchi<\/a> contribute around 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, Mullenweg said that to give their independent effort the \u201cpush it needs to get off the ground,\u201d he was deactivating their WordPress.org accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort,\u201d Mullenweg wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, Mullenweg revealed he was also deactivating the accounts of three other people, with little explanation given: S\u00e9 Reed<\/a>, Heather Burns<\/a>, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen<\/a>. Reed, it\u2019s worth noting, is president and CEO<\/a> of a newly incorporated non-profit called<\/a> the WP Community Collective<\/a>, which is setting out to serve as a \u201cneutral home for collaboration, contribution, and resources\u201d around WordPress and the broader open source ecosystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Burns, a former contributor to the WordPress project, took to X this morning<\/a> to express surprise at her deactivation, noting that she hadn\u2019t been involved in the project since 2020. Over on Bluesky, Rand-Hendriksen suggested<\/a> that Mullenweg was targeting him and Burns because of their prior objections to governance at WordPress. He wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

So why is he [Mullenweg] targeting Heather and me? Because we started talking about the need for proper governance, accountability, conflict of interest policies, and other things back in 2017. We both left the project in 2019, and apparently he still holds a grudge.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s worth noting that deactivating a WordPress.org account prevents the user from contributing through that channel, be it to the core project or any other plugins or themes they may be involved with. However, as it\u2019s hosted on GitHub<\/a> too, anyone is still able to access the code should they wish to fork it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In what was seemingly a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, Mullenweg said that any new fork could be called \u201cJKPress,\u201d and they could hold a joint \u201cWordPress + JKPress summit\u201d next year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJoost and Karim have a number of bold and interesting ideas, and I\u2019m genuinely curious to see how they work out,\u201d Mullenweg added. \u201cThe beauty of open source is they can take all of the GPL code in WordPress<\/a> and ship their vision. You don\u2019t need permission, you can just do things. If they create something that\u2019s awesome, we may even merge it back into WordPress, that ability for code and ideas to freely flow between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post was updated to provide clarification that de Valk and Marucchi didn\u2019t say they planned a fork, and that a suggestion was made to create mirrors for the plugins and themes repositories, while also offering to lead on the next release of WordPress<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The spat between Automattic and WP Engine expands. I have a previous post with a little background about this $7.5 billion dollar company Automattic with a good opinion piece. https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/01\/11\/matt-mullenweg-deactivates-wordpress-accounts-of-contributors-planning-a-fork\/ By Paul Sawers Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members, two of whom he says planned to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"blocksy_meta":[],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Jason","author_link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/author\/jturning\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10301"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10303,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10301\/revisions\/10303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}