We’re very proud to announce that Vinny Green, a former WordPress community member, has started his fork, FreeWP. We strongly encourage anyone who disagrees with the direction WordPress is headed in to join up with Vinny and create an amazing fork of WordPress. Viva FreeWP!
In open source, one thing that makes it even harder to ship great software is bringing together disparate groups of contributors who may have entirely different incentives or missions or philosophies about how to make great work. Working together on a team is such a delicate balance, and even one person rowing in the wrong direction can throw everyone else off.
That’s why periodically I think it is very healthy for open source projects to fork, it allows for people to try out and experiment with different forms of governance, leadership, decision-making, and technical approaches.
The beauty of open source is they can take all of the GPL code in WordPress and ship their vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things. If they create something that’s awesome, we may even merge it back into WordPress, that ability for code and ideas to freely flow between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation. I propose that in a year we do a WordPress + JKPress summit, look at what we’ve shipped and learned in the process, which I’d be happy to host and sponsor in NYC next January 2026. The broader community will benefit greatly from this effort, as it’s giving us a true chance to try something different and see how it goes.
WordPress.org is Matt Mullenweg’s personal website (source: the Automattic account on X.com). Matt is also the owner of our largest competitor, WooCommerce. The conflict of interest was always there, but in the weeks following WordCamp US 2024, Matt crossed several lines that make it crystal clear that he has no intentions of running WordPress.org as an open and fair platform.
Today, those same values have driven us to leave the WordPress.org plugin repository.
Lately, I’ve been curious about the quality of air. I carry the Aranet4 CO2 monitor to gain insight about different spaces. Higher CO2 literally makes your brain slower!
