Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork
76 comments
·January 11, 2025diggan
From Mullenweg (https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/):
> To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.
He seems to be justifying the deactivation by claiming it will 'help them', somehow?
j45
It feels like a backhanded compliment and encouragement.
If there wasn’t a threat perceived you could with them well and ask them to let you know them how they might need help.
LexiMax
It's kind of wild that he's escalated from stalking ex-Tumblr users a year ago to...this. I guess when people show you who you they are, believe them.
GavinAnderegg
In case anyone is looking for some background on this, I wrote this post before seeing the news today. Stuff's not been great in the WordPress community leading up to this point, and Mullenweg deciding to deactivate the accounts of folks who might start new forks certainly isn't helping matters.
iambateman
This is - without question - the best thing that could happen for their fork. It’s generating 100x the amount of attention they would’ve gotten otherwise.
I’ve known about Joost for many years and have a ton of respect for his work. Best of luck making this happen!
TehCorwiz
If they weren't planning a fork like one of the other comments suggests they totally should now because the have the media initiative, people will be looking for it. Strike while the iron is hot basically.
gpm
Huh, the injunction against "blocking, disabling, or interfering with WPEngine’s and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’ (hereinafter “WPEngine and Related Entities”) access to wordpress.org;" [0] is still in effect right? There's nothing on the docket saying otherwise...
These contributors are "partners" under the common meaning of the word right? After all the tweet [1] that Matt links to from his own blog post [2] says
> We are committed to working with Joost, Karim, and other respected voices in the community to ensure WordPress’s future is stronger than ever.
That sounds like a partnership to me.
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
andypants
> with WPEngine’s
"WPEngine's" being key here. Some of the banned people are wordpress contributors, unrelated to WPE. The other banned people are not contributors at all and seemingly the only reason they were banned is that matt is angry at their tweets.
gpm
You can't cut "WPEngine’s" off from the disjunctive that follows.
> and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’
That clause is why I discussed the evidence that the people banned seem to me to fall under the meaning of the word partners.
rmccue
I’ve been deactivated on Slack since very early in this dispute, and later banned from the issue tracker: https://journal.rmccue.io/468/on-contribution/
The only potential cause of this were some posts discussing the arguments behind the original lawsuit - they’re written in my personal capacity, and I’m not a partner of WP Engine. Matt is simply banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made - it’s nothing to do with their partnership status.
(I’m not a WP Engine partner, and my day job is running a competitor to them. Aside from that, I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.)
atkailash
[dead]
that_guy_iain
That does not sound like a partnership at all. It sounds like an intent to work with the community.
gpm
Is "committed to working with" not a subset of the class of "partners" in your vernacular? What do you think is required to be "partners"?
And it names the specific members of the community, Joost, Karim, who subsequently had their accounts deactivated, not just the community at large.
jcranmer
> What do you think is required to be "partners"?
We're not working on vernacular definition here, we're working on legal definition. And while I'm not sure of the particular definition that's going to be in play, I strongly suspect that the actual definition is going to require some sort of "meeting of the minds" and (not necessarily written) partnership agreement to qualify as a "partner" for the purpose of the injunction.
"We are committed to working with [...] We stand ready" isn't strong enough to actually constitute a partnership, I'm pretty sure--it is at best an expression of intent to make one.
ChrisArchitect
Related:
Aligning Automattic's Sponsored Contributions to WordPress
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42650138
WordPress: Joost/Karim Fork
itronitron
and also:
Forking is Beautiful - WordPress News >> https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/spoon/
jazzyjackson
The link to “open press” was a bit confusing since the website no longer mentions that name, boasting an open source knowledge graph for LLM agents now, but with a little jumping around I found the empty git repo with the feature list quoted in the blog
saaaaaam
This blogpost is astonishing.
It’s like Mullenweg has been taking lessons from the Trump school of media relations.
“Joost is a self-proclaimed leader in the SEO space, an industry known for making the web better… he was not effective at leading the marketing team or doing the work himself… Karim leads a small WordPress agency called Crowd Favorite which counts clients such as Lexus and ABC and employs ~50 people… In the meantime, on top of my day job running a 1,700+ person company with 25+ products, which I typically work 60-80 hours a week on…”
It’s as if he’s saying “these little people are barely worthy of my attention and have achieved nothing, compare them to me I’m powerful, I’m important, you should respect my power and importance…”
legitster
Oh man. This isn't just "some contributors". Joost is basically one of the founding fathers of the Wordpress ecosystem. Him getting deactivated is like Stalin assassinating Trotsky.
adamtaylor_13
What the fork is he thinking?
(Sorry I’ll see myself out)
sneak
People who don’t support forking don’t actually support the concept of open source/free software.
Forking is essential.
throwaway48476
Exactly.
No one should care if matt is unpleasant when they can just fork and be done with him.
saaaaaam
That disregards the value and recognition of the Wordpress brand beyond people who understand the concept of forking.
The problem is that the tens of thousands of small businesses who placed their trust in Wordpress will be damaged by this. I know - anecdotally - that many of those people like Wordpress “because it is free” (like both beer and speech) and because they know - even fuzzily - that because of that there’s lots of cool useful stuff that is available.
Now, sure, a lot of that cool useful stuff will still work with a fork. But it splits the message and gradually - not overnight - people developing that cool and useful stuff may lose faith and do something else.
What Millenweg is doing hits at the very heart of what open source means - and what community means - and is, as far as I can see, an absolutely cynical move made in the pursuit of profit and vanity.
TheNewsIsHere
I agree with you.
I run a business that is invested in the WordPress ecosystem.
It’s going to be a non-trivial endeavor to get a fork seriously running and reliably delivered.
In the meantime the community has to suffer this clown’s further antics.
The TechCrunch headline is not accurate. As far as I understand, none of the people whose WordPress accounts were deactivated were planning a fork.
The current top comment and discussion on this Reddit thread provide good context:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1hylx50/matt_tro...