A war has been raging in the WordPress ecosystem for the past two weeks. In a latest development, employees are leaving the feisty WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, who is dividing the WordPress community. An eighth of his own staff do not seem to share his position. It’s about demands in the millions, blackmail, “nuclear options” and, in a very big way, defending the future of open source against profit-oriented corporate giants.
Contributors are losing their shit in the WordPress open-source slack. In order to contribute, you have to promise you aren’t “affiliated” with WP Engine.
Matt Mullenweg has gotten real Elon Musk here.
This whole drama makes me wonder if it’s only a matter of time till I have to migrate my company away from WordPress.
Man, fuck matt mullenweg
I suspect we’ll end up seeing a hard fork that’s entirely community-driven rather than owned by a company. It’s happened before - for example, Libreoffice was forked from OpenOffice .org when Sun Microsystems owned it.
God, I hope so. WP needs to shift focus away from Gutenberg and fix the horrendous backend. It desperately needs an ORM and a sane router.
Here it is:
WPEngine has been trash for a few years now but this felt like a weird way to handle it, I don’t love that they gobbled up ACF and DeliciousBrains and slowly began enshittifying their products which do feel almost necessary to core
