In this article, I highlight a few points of WordPress history that were early indicators of an eventual crisis in the project leadership. With increasing calls and support for a leadership change in the project, I review how the direction and goals set by Matt Mullenweg are increasingly at odds with FLOSS values and with the needs of the WordPress community. Matt’s needs are primarily aligned with Automattic’s over those of the community, and the strain is starting to show along numerous fault lines.
The context for this article is the publishing of recent views by Henrik Luehrsen, Joost de Valk, and others who are pointing out that WordPress needs to modernize its Core and deal with its technical debt. In this context, they advocate for making greater use of canonical plugins, which project co-founder Matt Mullenweg supports. The general consensus is that WordPress seems to have lost its way under Mullenweg’s leadership, and needs to establish a roadmap for the Core software that restores its earlier value on simplicity. In this article, I affirm greater use of canonical…
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.