In this article, I use Matt Mullenweg’s response to a recent article based on an interview he gave to Inc. as a framework to outline some of the reasons why the WordPress project needs a new governance model. I support recent calls for this change. In addition to other reasons I have outlined in related posts, I recap here Matt’s departure from FLOSS ideals, his misrepresentation of his motives in attacking WP Engine, and in attempts to then cast himself as the victim. I then briefly discuss how the increasingly chaotic atmosphere in the community…
In his WCUS talk and elsewhere, Matt Mullenweg built an argument for Five for the Future on the foundation of the Tragedy of the Commons, casually dismissing Elinor Ostrom’s work to affirm the validity of Hardin’s “TC” theory to maintain the premise under which he’s about to attack WP Engine. Rather than staking the philosophy of an open source project and its ecosystem on this fundamentally flawed, baseless theory, we need discard it and build on a better foundation.