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My sweet summer child. Matt has unilateral control over every aspect of Wordpress, including the open-source project and community. He exerts that control, whether that's closing Slack channels or banning members.

https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/




He cannot control how people choose to spend their own free time. If these people want to have a chatroom about WordPress sustainability which isn't hosted by Matt, there's nothing Matt can do to stop them. They can easily do this for free.

This is a huge drama about nothing. Matt is being a baby and so is everybody else who's crying about it. There's no money on the line here, so there's literally no reason for any of the involved parties to not simply walk away and stop associating with each other.


>There's no money on the line here, so there's literally no reason for (...)

I assume volunteers working in the sustainability team for free primarily care about non-monetary things.


There is literally nothing stopping them from continuing in another chatroom, not administered by Matt.


You can't force folks to contribute stuff, but you very much can prevent them from contributing things.

That was my experience- I didn't feel like it was worth all the work just to be able to contribute to WP, for reasons that are becoming more widelt visable.

And yes, there is money on the line for a lot of folks- if you sell WP-based solutions to the gov and large NGOs (that's what the co I was working with did), than it is very hard to "just walk away" because in addition to ceasing the current work you'd have to find an alternate solution, re-train the hundreds of people you've trained to admin the system, etc/etc/etc.

Some WP sites have thousands of admin users and hundreds of thousand of items of content.

So if photomatt takes his toys and goes home, yeah, these projects all have the code and can fork it or do whatever and photomatt can't do much, but there is a tremendous real cost to folks. Millions of dollars in the case of the small 7-person shop which I worked at.


They can publish their "how much carbon did this WordPress instance burn" plugin without any approval from Matt, under the name of their own organization. Since they weren't being paid to do this in the first place, the only thing Matt was giving them was a chatroom which they can replace for free.

If they were actually being paid for this, which is contrary to numerous other comments in this discussion, then it actually does make sense for Matt to cancel that work. But I have been assured they weren't being paid, so they didn't have any money on the line and can just walk away from Matt's org while simultaneously continuing the work they are supposedly super passionate about.


In one level,yeah you're right- a) I don't know if it's really super important work and b) the physical payout is probably the same for those folks doing that work regardless of if it's done in the context of WP or not.

You might consider, though, that the context of a bit of work does matter. And to other folks working in that context might take that capricious dismissal as a mark of how their own contributions might be seen.

Like yeah, they weren't getting paid, but that also means it wasn't a big cost to keep them volunteering- there are people up and down the WP ecosystem doing a lot of work for the exact same reasons. It's why- to my original point- I never tried to participate in the larger development efforts: the thing is locked up by one person so ultimately those folks are working on someone else's toy.


He can't stop them from doing stuff on their own as they like. That is true.

However once the publish: He has the trademark, and unless this group of people was very careful in their wording, to only state technical facts and not opinions, he can sue them for perceived damages and based on recent action he seems to have chosen the aggressive approach, despites potential trouble for his company and product.




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