Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has disabled the accounts of several members of the WordPress.org community, some of whom have been leading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project.
While community criticism of WordPress governance is not new, the latest brouhaha began in September when Mullenweg publicly chastised WP Engine, a commercial hosting company built on top of WordPress, for profiting without giving much back. Things quickly escalated (read all about it here), with WP Engine filing a lawsuit after being denied access to WordPress’ core resources, and then a court ordered WordPress to restore access.
Amidst all of this, key figures from within the wider WordPress community have stepped forward. Joost de Valk – creator of the WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and former head of marketing and communications for the WordPress Foundation) – last month released his “vision for a new era of WordPress,” hinting at a possible fork in the form of “federated and independent repositories.” Karim Marucchi, CEO of online enterprise consulting firm Crowd Favorite, echoed these sentiments in a separate blog post.
WP Engine indicated that it was ready to lend a hand to the corporation.
Mullenweg, for his part, has publicly supported the notion of a new WordPress fork — a term that describes when someone takes code from an open source project and creates a copy, which can take on a life of its own. a special community. of contributors. (It is also possible to merge such contributions back into the original project.)
Take the fork
Earlier this week, Automattic announced that 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. That prompted de Valk to take to X on Friday to show that he’s ready to lead the way in the next edition of WordPress, with Marucchi adding that “his team is ready.”
Together, de Valk and Marucchi contribute about 10 hours a week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, in a sarcasm-laced blog post published this morning, Mullenweg said that to give their freelance endeavors “the push it needs to get off the ground,” he was deactivating their WordPress accounts. org.
“I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or connect with WP Engine to join their new endeavors,” Mullenweg wrote.
At the same time, Mullenweg also revealed that he was deactivating the accounts of three other people, with little explanation given: Sé Reed, Heather Burns and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it’s worth noting, is the president and CEO of a newly formed nonprofit organization called the WP Community Collective, which is aiming to serve as a “neutral home for collaboration, input, and resources” around WordPress and the broader open-source ecosystem. open. .
Burns, a former contributor to the WordPress project, took to X this morning to express surprise at her deactivation, noting that she had not been involved with the project since 2020. At Bluesky, Rand-Hendriksen suggested that Mullenweg was targeting him and Digjet because of their previous opposition to WordPress governance. He wrote:
So why is he? [Mullenweg] targeting me and heather? 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.
It’s worth noting that deactivating a WordPress.org account prevents affected users from contributing through that channel, either to the main project or any other plugins or themes they may be involved with. However, since it’s also hosted on GitHub, anyone can commit to the project.
In what appeared to be an open hint, Mullenweg said that any new fork could be called “JKPress” and they could hold a “joint WordPress + JKPress Summit” next year.
“Joost and Karim have a number of bold and interesting ideas, and I’m really curious to see how they play out,” added Mullenweg. “The beauty of open source is that they can take all the GPL code in WordPress and ship their vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things. If they create something that’s great, we can even merge it back into WordPress, because the ability for code and ideas to flow freely between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation.”
