News Summary

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members who have expressed intentions to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project. This move comes amid ongoing criticism of WordPress’s governance. The controversy began in September when Mullenweg criticized WP Engine for its business practices, leading to legal actions and a court order to restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress resources. Key figures such as Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi have proposed a new vision for WordPress, potentially leading to a fork with federated and independent repositories. Mullenweg has sarcastically encouraged these efforts by deactivating accounts and suggesting a potential new project name, ‘JKPress’. This action affects contributors’ ability to work on the core project via WordPress.org, though they can still engage through GitHub.