According to a recent news report, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and owner of Automattic, has taken action by blocking four participants in the WordPress.org community. These participants, mainly marketers and SEO specialists, were blocked in response to their discussions about creating a WordPress fork and proposing a change in the community’s control model. Specifically, the individuals affected by this decision were Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Randriksen.
Mullenweg expressed his support for the creation of a fork and believes that such actions are beneficial for open projects. He explained that even one participant going in a different direction can disrupt collaborative work, and forks allow for experimentation in development, control models, and leadership styles. Mullenweg expressed curiosity about the ideas proposed by the blocked participants and is eager to see the outcomes of their actions. He believes that the fork will bring new opportunities for the WordPress community.
In addition, Mullenweg highlighted the importance of open source code, which allows individuals to take WordPress and implement their own visions in new projects without requiring permission. He stated that if valuable improvements are made in a new project, they can be transferred back to WordPress, demonstrating how open code fosters innovation. Mullenweg proposed holding a joint summit for developers of WordPress and the fork project a year later to evaluate progress and share learnings.
Lastly, Mullenweg commented on the idea of a decentralized and unmoderated plug-in catalog, where designers would have complete freedom, including the ability to display advertising banners in the administrator interface and collect user data.