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.

They weren't even planning to create a fork.

• Matt said his company was going to all but stop contributing to WordPress for now out of spite against WPEngine https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-sponsored-contributions-to-wordpress/

• These people said "OK we'll take responsibility for the next release within the current WordPress organization framework so that work can continue"

• Matt said nuh-nuh, no you aren't https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/

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"

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

My dislike of Wordpress is being validated every day

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.

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.

Sounds like a spoiled child

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

Speaks at Disrupt

People try to disrupt his profit

“No you can’t do that”

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

100% switching to whatever the fork ends up being.

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.

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.

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

If anyone wants to see it from the horses mouth:

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

That's him.

Can someone remove this asshole?

That’s not how open source is sposto work…

🍿