Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of WordPress (biz) and director of the .org declared open war on WPEngine, the largest host. Back-and-forth lawsuits, bickering on Twitter, Matt acting like an entitled whiny billionaire, and, most recently, he revoked their access to their largest plugin in the directory, forked it, renamed it, and claimed it as his.
That’s the REALLY short version.
Something similar happened with Owncloud and the result was a fork to Nextcloud that basically killed Owncloud and it’s for profit associated services. Open source does not have patience for dictators.
Yeah, I think people are already looking at or working on ways to fork WordPress. At this point, I suspect the community would flock, but there’s also been a LOT of talk about a decentralized plugin/theme repo.
If not now, it will happen. Like people, information wants to be free.
Not all people want to be free
Sincerely: while you may believe that I’ve seen enough corruption in the world to know how typical humanity reacts.
Some always seek to destroy, exploit or make profit from others.
If anyone in Open Source isn’t prepared for
1. more scams
2. people monetizing their work
3. Knowledge & data freely given will always be stolen & used for profiteering
Example: Years ago “someone” stole pictures of me posted on Facebook ( by friends) & created a fake account. Someone finally told me I shouldn’t be posting pictures of myself online if I took my career seriously. 😳 Checked it out & had to prove to FB I was me. Apparently some catfisher or something.
We already see big name accounts here being targeted & many fakes.
We aren’t doomed to repeat the mistakes of previous generations but there is a **lot** of work to be done.
Thanks friend.
Sincerely: this is a good example of what I meant about the future of open source. It will be hacker versus hacker eventually. Humans & their ego make them do dumb things. Witnessed it repeatedly.
Oddbean new post about login | logout