I also don’t understand how, when Matt Mullenweg makes a bad decision, suddenly the software is problematic, when it was fine the day before.
Further to this, I’ve been grumbling about how slow & bloated WP is for years but it felt stable enough due to the ecosystem and huge market for building WP sites. I can still make fast sites and only relied on ACF Pro which felt a safe long term bet. Even when WPEngine bought ACF, it still felt safe for the future.
All this recent drama with the repo access etc has showed that potentially none of it is safe and it’s pushed me to look for alternatives to WP. With capitalists like Joost de Valk et al circling like vultures too it seems even less secure.
There’s a real catch here isn’t there - how to make open source projects sustainable and in the spirit of FOSS.
When billion dollar companies are tussling over IP created largely by volunteers it’s obviously gone too far towards $$$
The absolute state of freemium plugin nagging hints at how hard it might be to make money in the WP ecosystem… but then certain members of poststatus.com seem to be doing OK for themselves after monopolising certain types of plugins.
One of MM’s points in this whole fight boiled down to ‘use WP but give back’ and maybe that’s a sustainable way to contribute. For me that might look like doing client work 4 days a week and developing themes/plugins one day a week.
Yes, leave him, but not the code. Your argument is actually treating him as the software, which is what you just criticized him for doing.
That’s what we did with ClassicPress. In fact, we recognized the signs six years ago, and left him but forked the code. Because my point about the software itself still stands; whatever the terrible decision-making going on at WordPress, its software was still good. That’s why it was worth forking.
Note: I said “good”. I didn’t say “great”, and certainly not “perfect”. Those talking of looking at completely different CMSs seem to me to be looking for something that will never exist. It’s like those businesses that decide that they need to refactor their whole codebase just to “modernize” it. That makes no sense at all; it just introduces a whole new set of bugs for no reason.
My choice of words was deliberate. WP’s software was good, but of course it needed improvement and, in particular, the removal of bloat and improvements in accessibility. We have already accomplished much of that in ClassicPress, and (unless they went full throttle on blocks) most people switching over from WP can now use CP with relatively little tinkering.
I wouldn’t. I would be learning marketing skills (including using the ClassicPress Directory) and how to serve my software from Github or my own servers.