Honest question from an outsider. WordPress is open source, so why hasn't the project been replaced with one that doesn't include him?
Just the code of WordPress needs to be updated that the plugins are downloaded from the new URL.
It's not so hard.
Well, you can ask plugin owners to upload a particular file with a particular key to their plugin on WordPress.org. That way they can prove they have access, and they should be allowed ownership of the plugin on the fork.
Imagine if you make your money from selling your plugin, and Matt does this to you. Every WP plugin developer has to live in fear of this happening at any moment, and you can be certain it will happen if you show any kind of resistance towards Matt.
Matt may be able to fork plugins, but they won't be able to fork every single plugin in the directory, as it isn't very feasible.
It also would then not necessarily be obvious to Matt which plugin listings in the new directory have been claimed, and which plugins are being updated by other people from the community.
But even when you do that, I'd expect him to just give people an ultimatum - either "officially" host on his plugin directory, or others, but not on both. You'd have to reach critical mass pretty much immediately, or Matt can bully the ecosystem into compliance.
I may ignore what people say and look what they do. I do this to make people angry :-)
What is the alternative? To tell people how sad it is they can't possibly anything ever? Why bother? Does more harm than good.
You're legitimizing Matt's bullying (by telling people "well, if you don't act counter to game theory and deliberately worsen your own standing, you obviously want to be bullied!") and thus actively telling people "they can't possibly anything ever". What you're doing does far more harm than good.
I've build many great popular things on other people's turf/platforms of which nothing remains.
I have a wp blog too since the beginning! We tried to rebuild our lost communities there. Then akismet started banning people for posting comments with links and I discovered it has no appeal mechanism.
Meet the new boss..
If anyone fills a complaint and can prove ownership a redirect can be provided.
Could maybe perhaps train an llm on a plugin and have it assist.making a free or not bloated version of some popular ones.
And we are now back at the "having your plugin stolen" problem.
Only problem is that existing WP installations would need to be manually patched to the new domain name. As long as users don't do that they'll still be in Matt's control.
But yeah, can't we create some bots that scan the internet for WP sites and send the webmasters an email informing the corruption going on inside WP and the option for them to move to the new community.
If you cannot do that, every developer that moved with you potentially just lost their livelihood. That's the crux of it. There's no technical issue to solve here, it's purely a social and economical one.
They host a _lot_ of sites. They were forced by Matt to maintain a mirror of the .org theme/plugin repos. They could very easily come up with a list of plugins that'll allow 99% or 99.9% or more of WP sites to work. They 100% have the technical skills and the cashflow and the business case to do this. They could very easily build and deploy this, and donate it to a properly managed foundation - the way Wordpress.org _ought_ to be.
My guess is the only reason they haven't done it (or gone public with it if they're already building it) is because they're waiting for the lawsuit to give them most of Matt's and Automattic's money first.
You act like moving gradually has no danger for the plugin authors. You've moved 5% of plugins over. Whoops, Matt stole their listings, and since you didn't reach critical mass nobody uses your WP fork which points to your new plugin directory.
You've just wiped out the livelihoods of 5% of plugin developers.
You have to move all installations to the new domain, but you don't have to do that in 1 day. You can create bots scanning the internet for WP installations and mail the webmaster and inform them about the corruption at WordPress and give them info how to patch their instance.
Matt would have to clone all the plugins and keep them up to date by copying the plugins from the new domain. But he would be risking a lawsuit for each plugin he does this with. Seems like a lot of work with a lot of risk.
YES, YOU DO! At least you have to move the majority of all installations day 1. I don't know why you keep repeating this.
Matt stealing a plugin isn't a theoretical issue. He has already done it. It has happened. I'm not constructing some unlikely scenario, I'm telling you what already occurred. WP plugins are GPL licensed, so there's no legal risk if he doesn't behave incredibly stupidly.
You keep throwing technical solutions against a social and economical issue. It doesn't work. There's no technical solution here.
Every plugin you move gradually is a livelihood you potentially destroyed. Can you at least acknowledge this?
Yeah ok, that sucks pretty hard.
Ok, then what about DDOSing wp.org during the entire transition? Just an idea, maybe a bit crazy.
20+ years of OSS contributions and Matt leading the project is a LOT of inertia. You can fork the project right now yourself, but until some significant number of contributors move their efforts to your fork, you get no change of direction.
Makes me wonder with the apparent lack of strong will just how much of the dissent is actually a (very) loud minority.
I dunno, but we can figure that out, we always have. Maybe, like you said, we should just start with not desperately holding something like that together. Maybe not everyone in the world needs to be in the same place at the same time, maybe a hodgepodge is okay. But people have the need to inform and be informed, so a solution will eventually crop up.