this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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43
Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork (techcrunch.com)
submitted 8 months ago by chobeat@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] UndulyUnruly@lemmy.world 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

“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.”

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

He's actually cutting off his own legs and soon he'll be dancing on pegs.

[–] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago

He dances for nickels

[–] nixcamic@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

When you want to build a cult of personality and accidentally build a flourishing diverse community lol

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 13 points 8 months ago (4 children)

My dislike of Wordpress is being validated every day

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[–] _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Wonder how pissy he’s gonna be when the project is forked and everyone leaves the original.

[–] kalleboo@lemmy.world 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

They weren't even planning to create a fork.

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"

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 8 months ago

He certainly seems to be labouring under the mistaken impression that he's a business genius.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 8 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] thesystemisdown@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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/

[–] lipilee@feddit.nl 1 points 8 months ago

Huh, this actually looks very promising.

[–] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 months ago

affecting

[–] daddy32@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

WPE is already in legal battle with him, isn't it?

[–] irotsoma@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] blockheadjt@sh.itjust.works 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like a spoiled child

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[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

remember when matt publically attacked a trans woman on twitter because she called him out about his transphobia

[–] Mortoc@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] pmc@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 8 months ago

Hopefully he explodes with hammers and hammers go flying everywhere

[–] MITM0@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago

As if people didn't Clone Wordpress already, let's call it BlogPrint

[–] turkalino@lemmy.yachts 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Speaks at Disrupt

People try to disrupt his profit

“No you can’t do that”

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Sturgist@lemmy.ca 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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

[–] Dagamant@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

100% switching to whatever the fork ends up being.

[–] MehBlah@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

This is a guy who should have just went to vegas and bought a expensive escort for his mid life crisis.

For those who haven't been following this epic meltdown

https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=wordpress

[–] thejml@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

If anyone wants to see it from the horses mouth:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=photomatt

That's him.

[–] 8000gnat@reddthat.com 3 points 8 months ago

🕐👄

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[–] YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I think he misunderstands the label/title “benevolent dictator for life” that can get assigned to people on some really popular open source projects.

[–] kokesh@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Can someone remove this asshole?

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's more likely that a fork becomes dominant, making him irrelevant. That's almost the same thing.

[–] kurcatovium@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

That's better, because he would have to live his life knowing he completely fucked himself.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago

Do you think he has enough self-awareness?

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[–] Grass@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I can't access the link. who is he?

[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

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.
[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] tux0r@feddit.org 1 points 8 months ago

Technically, WordPress started as a fork.

[–] StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

He's a co-creator of WordPress and (my opinion) a total knob.

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