Content Management Systems (CMS) Troubles/Conflict in WordPress
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The Register UK ☛ WordPress leader Matt Mullenweg exiles five contributors
WordPress co-founder Matthew Mullenweg on Saturday deactivated the WordPress.org accounts of five members of the WordPress community, and justified his actions by saying it will encourage them to fork the open source content management system.
”Forking” a project refers to the practice of copying code – as is allowed under many open source licenses – and using it as the basis for a new development effort that’s usually run by a different team that aims to take a project in a different direction.
The idea of a WordPress fork has gained currency in recent months amid the lengthy and acrimonious spat between WordPress.org (which is personally owned by Mullenweg and hosts resources for the WordPress community) and WordPress hosting service WP Engine.
The dispute centers on Mullenweg’s belief that WP Engine profits from the open source WordPress project without making appropriate contributions to its development and operations, and his attempts to have WP Engine change its ways by paying to use the “WordPress” trademark.
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WordPress is in trouble
On December 20th, Mullenweg announced that WordPress.org would be on holiday break for an unspecified amount of time. In a post on the WordPress.org blog, he again mentioned being “compelled to provide free labor and services to WP Engine thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers”. He also invited people to fund legal attacks against him by signing up for WP Engine services, and hoped to have the “time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year”.
This was the first time WordPress.org had ever gone on break, and it was another instance of Mullenweg using a core part of the WordPress community to send a message. WordPress.org returned to service on January 4th, but plugin and theme updates weren’t being reviewed until then. I’m all for giving volunteers time off, but this came as a surprise to the community and there was initially no indication when the break would end. Mullenweg’s “woe is me” language around maybe, possibly, being able to find the resources to reopen a core piece of WordPress infrastructure didn’t help things. It further cemented that Matt Mullenweg’s current mood is an important function of whether or not the WordPress community operates smoothly.
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OS News ☛ WordPress is in trouble
I haven’t wasted a single word on the ongoing WordPress drama yet, but the longer Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO and thus owner of WordPress, keeps losing his mind, I can’t really ignore the matter any more. OSNews runs, after all, on WordPress – self-hosted, at least, so not on Mullenweg’s WordPress.com – and if things keep going the way they are, I simply don’t know if WordPress remains a viable, safe, and future-proof CMS for OSNews.
I haven’t discussed this particular situation with OSNews owner, David Adams, yet, mostly since he’s quite hands-off in the day-to-day operations and has more than enough other matters to take care of, but I think the time has come to start planning for a potential worst-case scenario in which Mullenweg takes even more of whatever he’s taking and WordPress implodes entirely. Remember – even if you self-host WordPress outside of Automattic, several core infrastructure parts of WordPress still run through Automattic, so we’re still dependent on what Mullenweg does or doesn’t do.