> This entire debacle also hurts the entire open source community
How so? IIUC, WordPress blocks access to their servers. Those are not part of "open source".
How so? IIUC, WordPress blocks access to their servers. Those are not part of "open source".
https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De...
https://automattic.com/2024/wp-engine-cease-and-desist-exhib...
But as you'll read, there is so much murkiness to this that a mud bath would be positively transparent. The .org is not the foundation, but the foundation says that it pays for the .org, the .org is not the foundation but lives on the foundation's AS.
I doubt much if anything will happen, but all this seems to be doing to me is shining a light on how the distinction between Matt, Automattic, WP.org, WPF, and WP.com all vary depending on Matt's needs, wants and priorities on any given day.
Apart from that - major turbulences in the WP and in general CMS world could be a positive thing. Maybe it's time for a new player in the space. Wordpress absolute dominance for basically decades kind of sucks air out of the space for competitors, there are some like Ghost and others but they are barely crawling compared to WP market share. Apart from that even fork within WP itself wouldn't necessary be a bad thing - some decisions and direction of the WP itself are questionable looking from developer standpoint like bringing to life insanely complicated React-based toolkit as WP editor building block, archaic conventions in the PHP codebase, lack of standardized patterns and guidelines for plugins creation and many more.
Personally I would love to have PHP-based CMS, built either based on Symphony or Laravel with extensive plugins and theming, capabilities and resonable market share.