Automattic’s CEO and WordPress co-originator, Matt Mullenweg, has taken a drastic step by deactivating accounts of key WordPress.org community members. It includes those voicing strong intentions towards initiating a fork of the open-source WordPress project.
This move follows Mullenweg’s criticism of WP Engine, a commercial hosting firm founded on WordPress, for profiting without adequate contribution to the project. Things escalated thereafter with WP Engine filing a legal complaint after being denied access to essential WordPress resources.
Prominent WordPress community figures, Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast (a WordPress-centric SEO tool), and Karim Marucchi, CEO of web consulting firm Crowd Favorite, led the conversation about a potential WordPress fork. They hinted at possibilities of independent federated repositories.
Mullenweg affirmed his support for a new WordPress fork. It refers to a process where someone replicates the code from an open-source project, giving life to a distinct community of contributors.
Feeling the Fork Effect
Automattic declared a reduction in its contribution to the core WordPress project in response to WP Engine’s contribution. This triggered a strong reaction from de Valk and Marucchi — they jointly pledged around 10 hours per week to different areas of the WordPress project. In response, Mullenweg deactivated their WordPress.org accounts, encouraging them to align with WP Engine instead.
Simultaneously, Mullenweg also suspended accounts of Sé Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen, without much clarification. Interestingly Reed heads the recently formed non-profit, WP Community Collective, aimed at fostering improved collaboration around WordPress.
The former WordPress contributor, Burns, expressed surprise at her deactivation, given no involvement with the project since 2020. Rand-Hendriksen suggested that both him and Burns were targeted owing to their past issues with WordPress’s governance.
Account deactivation restricts users from contributing via that platform. Despite this, thanks to GitHub’s open hosting, anyone can still fork the project.
Highlighting the merit of open source, Mullenweg humorously suggested a new fork be named “JKPress”. He showed interest in the innovative ideas proposed by de Valk and Marucchi, stating, “the beauty of open source is they can take all of the GPL code in WordPress and ship their vision.”
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