Automatic CEO and WordPress co-creator, Matt Mullenweg has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members, including two who he believes were spearheading a new fork of the open source WordPress project.
A fork refers to someone taking the code of an open-source project, like WordPress and creating a copy that can take on a life of its own through a new community of contributors.
In the past, Mullenweg said he was in support of a fork of the WordPress site.
However, recently key figures in the WordPress community have stepped forward to discuss new visions for the WordPress era. These figures were Joost de Valk, the creator of WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast, and Karim Marucchi, CEO of enterprise web consulting firm Crows Favourite who each outlined their ideal steps forward in separate blog posts, breaking away from Mullenweg.
In his own blog post, Mullenweg referred to de Valk and Marucchi’s plans as a fork, despite neither of them announcing such plans, however de Valk did discussing creating federated mirrors.
“Joost and Karim’s fork, which I’ll call JKPress until they come up with a better name, has a number of ideas they want to try out around governance and architecture,” Mullenweg said.
“However in Joost and Karim’s new project, they don’t need to follow our process or put in the hours to prove their worth within the WordPress.org ecosystem, they can just lead by example by shipping code and product to people that they can use, evaluate, and test out for themselves.”
Marrucchi has taken to X to clarify that at no point was he and de Valk planning to Fork WordPress.
Through blocking WordPress.org accounts, Mullenweg prevents the users form contributing through that channel through the core project or any plugins or themes they may be involved in.
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