Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and owner of Automattic, has blocked the accounts of four participants (Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen — mostly marketers and SEO specialists) in the wordpress.org directory for promoting ideas related to creating a fork of WordPress and changing the governance model within the community. Matt stated that he welcomes the creation of a fork and blocked the accounts to give it the necessary push to start and encourage action rather than just talk.
According to Matt, creating forks is beneficial for open projects, as even one participant moving in the wrong direction can disrupt collaborative efforts. Forks allow for experimentation with new development approaches, governance models, and forms of leadership. Matt notes that the fork discussed by the blocked participants has bold and interesting ideas, and he is curious to see what comes of it. The fork will be useful for the community as it will provide an opportunity to try something different.
Matt also wrote that the merit of open source is the ability to take WordPress and implement one's vision in a new project. To simply take it and do without needing permission. If something valuable is achieved in the new project, the community can incorporate improvements back into WordPress, as the ability to flow ideas between projects makes open source a driver of innovation. A year later, Matt proposes to hold a joint summit for WordPress developers and the fork to evaluate what has been accomplished and what has been learned.
Matt also ironically commented on the idea of creating a decentralized and unmoderated catalog of plugins and themes, where authors have complete freedom, including the freedom to place advertisement banners in the admin interface and collect user data.
Source: opennet.ru
