this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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[–] kalleboo@lemmy.world 16 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

They weren't even planning to create a fork.

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"

[–] blockheadjt@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 hours ago

Sounds like a spoiled child

[–] turkalino@lemmy.yachts 25 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Speaks at Disrupt

People try to disrupt his profit

“No you can’t do that”

[–] MolecularCactus1324@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago

Who disrupts the disrupters?

[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 50 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] Mortoc@lemmy.world 17 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I do not, source?

Not that I don’t believe you, but if we’re gonna hate on this guy even more, we should make sure it’s for facts.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 167 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] UndulyUnruly@lemmy.world 24 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

“But I’m just a narcissist, I’m what matters here. You must worship me, why don’t you? I’ll cut off your legs.”

He's actually cutting off his own legs and soon he'll be dancing on pegs.

[–] nixcamic@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago

When you want to build a cult of personality and accidentally build a flourishing diverse community lol

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 17 points 6 hours ago

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.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 94 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 6 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

This will not kill Wordpress outright but it might very well significantly factor into the decision of every future person deciding if they should write a plugin to support Wordpress or some alternative CMS or if they should host a Wordpress instance or something else, especially companies offering commercial hosting.

It might even lead to a project or two that will eventually replace Wordpress in its dominant position.

[–] thesystemisdown@lemmy.world 9 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Classic Press is a fork of WordPress that leaves out Gutenberg and has all the legacy PHP < 7.4 stuff stripped out. It's nice.

https://www.classicpress.net/

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 2 points 3 hours ago

It's not the same but laravel is a neat dev platform as well. Lots of community made libraries and relatively drama free.

[–] thejml@lemm.ee 51 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

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.

[–] SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 7 points 6 hours ago
[–] Dagamant@lemmy.world 15 points 7 hours ago

100% switching to whatever the fork ends up being.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 37 points 9 hours ago

That’s not how open source is sposto work…

[–] YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca 20 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] revv@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Honestly, it's kind of heartening how infrequently they forget the benevolent part.

Humans can't do then benevolent part for very long.

You can fake it for a bit, but by and large we're just absolutely shit at not being assholes to each other once you get outside of your family tribe or maybe your local neighbors.

(Also having a complete mental breakdown doesn't help, and boy howdy.)

[–] kokesh@lemmy.world 26 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

Can someone remove this asshole?

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 21 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

It's more likely that a fork becomes dominant, making him irrelevant. That's almost the same thing.

[–] kurcatovium@lemm.ee 7 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

That's better, because he would have to live his life knowing he completely fucked himself.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 13 points 6 hours ago

Do you think he has enough self-awareness?

[–] kokesh@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago
[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 7 points 9 hours ago

Please don't, this is the best entertainment I've had in months!

[–] dfi@lemmy.nz 5 points 7 hours ago

So does anyone know if the fork has been implemented or not?

[–] Grass@sh.itjust.works 3 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

I can't access the link. who is he?

[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 14 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

The original creator of Wordpress and the owner of a Wordpress hosting site. He's been having a meltdown for months because Wordpress is being used by WP Engine, a for-profit competitor hosting company, in compliance with the license. Since then, he has:

  • Changed the trademark license and retroactively sued WP Engine,
  • Disparaged WP Engine every time he had the chance,
  • Added a potentially legally binding checkbox to wordpress.com where the user must declare their disassociation with WP Engine (which also locked out actual employees),
  • Forcibly taken control of several community-made plugins,
  • Acted like ~~an absolute fucking buffoon~~ the innocent little lamb who's been set upon by the wolves.
[–] StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world 18 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

He's a co-creator of WordPress and (my opinion) a total knob.

[–] Grass@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 hours ago

With what I have now seen about him, I would be quite inclined to agree.

[–] tux0r@feddit.org 4 points 7 hours ago
[–] Lumidaub@feddit.org -3 points 9 hours ago

⚒️ 🚗 🔨