Matt Mullenweg, a WordPress founder and owner of Automattic, has blocked the accounts of four participants (Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen, who are mainly marketers and SEO specialists) in the wordpress.org directory, who promoted the idea of creating a WordPress fork and changing the management model within the community. Matt stated that he welcomes the creation of a fork and has blocked the accounts to give it the necessary push to start and encourage a shift from words to action.
According to Matt, creating forks is beneficial for open projects, as even one participant rowing in the wrong direction can disrupt smooth collaboration. Forks allow experimentation with new development approaches, management models, and forms of leadership. Matt notes that there are bold and interesting ideas in the fork discussed by the blocked participants, and he is curious to see what comes of it. The fork will be beneficial for the community as it will offer an opportunity to try something different.
Matt also wrote that the merit of open code is the ability to take WordPress and bring one's vision to a new project. Simply take it and do it, without the need to obtain permission. If something worthwhile can be implemented in the new project, the community will be able to transfer improvements back to WordPress, as the very ability for ideas to flow between projects is what makes open code a driver of innovation. In a year, Matt suggests holding 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 directory of plugins and themes, where authors are given complete freedom, including the freedom to place advertising banners in the admin interface and collect user data.
Forrás: opennet.ru
