WordPress is more of a backbone of the net than Twitter/X if you think about it.
And, like Twitter/X, it’s owned by one person. Matt Mullenweg. But unlike Twitter/X, 43% of the websites on the Web run on WordPress. That’s close to half!
This used to be a point of pride for me. I’m all about open source and I really love the WP community (for the most part), but seeing how much one person can derail all the good goodwill that accumulated over the last 20 years, and jeopardize such a big part of the net, is terrifying.
Unilaterally banning a large WordPress host, WP Engine, from getting updates from the WordPress plugin repository, made this the project almost instantly not secure.
Then taking over WP Engine’s Advanced Custom Post Types plugin and forking it, claiming security, is crazy. It was only unpatched because Matt wouldn’t let them patch it.
What really needs to be done, but will probably not happen, is Matt hands over the keys to the WordPress open source project to a larger team than just himself.
I’m not even saying that he needs to step away, per se. But there needs to be more checks and balances.
What do you think?