If anyone wants to see it from the hours mouth:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=photomatt
That's him.
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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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"
Sounds like a spoiled child
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.”
When you want to build a cult of personality and accidentally build a flourishing diverse community lol
Speaks at Disrupt
People try to disrupt his profit
“No you can’t do that”
Who disrupts the disrupters?
remember when matt publically attacked a trans woman on twitter because she called him out about his transphobia
Hopefully he explodes with hammers and hammers go flying everywhere
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.
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.
WPE is already in legal battle with him, isn't it?
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/
Huh, this actually looks very promising.
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?
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.
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.
That’s not how open source is sposto work…
100% switching to whatever the fork ends up being.
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.
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!
I think he misunderstands the label/title “benevolent dictator for life” that can get assigned to people on some really popular open source projects.
Honestly, it's kind of heartening how infrequently they forget the benevolent part.
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.)
🍿
So does anyone know if the fork has been implemented or not?
I can't access the link. who is he?
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 buffoon~~ the innocent little lamb who's been set upon by the wolves.
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.
An asshole
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