Multiple voices and the latest actions of the co-founder of WordPress warn of more chaos on the horizon for web creation and hosting software, with a community torn between launching a fork or giving up.
Several months after WordPress flooded the headlines due to the brawl between the open source platform (WordPress.org) and the company WP Engine (which uses its image despite being a private initiative), the controversy returns after more movements strangers by its co-founder, Matt Mullenweg.
Mullenweg has closed the accounts of five WordPress contributors, including Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi, noting that this is a way of inviting them to create their own forks (alternative versions) of WordPress, since they are dissatisfied with the current path. taking the project.
Parallel to this controversial decision by Mullenweg, which can be read as a rather forced invitation to stop working on WordPress, one of the engineers and developers of the project, Gavin Anderegg, has published a post on his personal blog in which he warns that “things have gotten out of control,” and that Mullenweg “seems to be acting more childish and impulsive than usual lately.”
In comments on social networks, many users claim that Mullenweg seems to be at a breaking point on a psychological level, which would be leading him to make a series of complicated decisions that have reduced the workforce at Automattic (the company of which Mullenweg is CEO and of which WordPress.com and other companies derived from the original WordPress are part). Specifically, 159 employees left Automattic in October of last year, without the company having made significant hires since then.
In an *We* are not talking about a fork,” De Valk said, highlighting that Mullenweg has made a unilateral decision to close his WordPress.org accounts, which has caused one outlet to speak of a forced “exile” of these two. programmers.
Among other behaviors that have put the community on alert, is a thread on Reddit posted by Mullenweg in which he asks: “What drama should I create in 2025?” Although Mullenweg’s joking nature is known, this post did not sit well with the WordPress community, urging them to seek psychological help.
Fewer resources for WordPress.org
As Anderegg explains in his posttitled “WordPress is in trouble,” the new roadmap that Mullenweg has in mind for his companies is for his collaborators and employees to spend less work time on open source software (WordPress.org) and instead focus more on the for-profit company WordPress.com.
“I am concerned that 45 hours a week is not enough time to keep WordPress secure and error-free,” warns Anderegg, concerned about the future of the open source web system that gives rise to a high percentage of all web pages on the planet. .
With all this, it can be seen that the leadership crisis of WordPress and Automattic is weighing down the public project and underlying companies. Some urge creating a fork with more democratized control among the community, but doing this is difficult. At the same time, Mullenweg’s actions seem to indicate that as long as he continues to exercise leadership, freedom of opinion for dissidents is not guaranteed.
