Fremantle
· WordPress ·
I used to really like working on WordPress plugins (I did it as large part of my job for quite a few years, and maintained a few open source plugins for much longer), and the recent news about Matt Mullenweg being a being a complete muppet is making me sad. It used to seem that there was a real separation between wordpress.com and wordpress.org, and that the latter was a community organisation that existed for the benefit of the users and developers of the software. But now it seems that if Matt Mullenweg decides then you can get your plugin not even just banned but actually usurped in-place and renamed. That's not how you fork something.
I don't know much about WP Engine, and I suspect they may well be a pretty uncaring company (i.e. a normal capitalist one) but it never mattered. There have always been people trying to make shit plugins and services on top of WordPress, and it's never been a problem. There have always been far more who are small businesses doing great stuff, and the fact that wordpress.org has provided hosting and distribution for their (open source) work has never been an issue. If WP Engine was really using resources that were costing too much, the sensible thing would've been to put rate limits in place, or demand that they have their own plugin cache (why are all WP Engine blogs updating independently via the main repo anyway?).
None of it would've been worth commenting on, but now that wordpress.org has got this stupid checkbox on the login form, and a plugin has been forcibly taken over, it just feels horrible. This one boring techbro has come and stuffed everything up! And after twenty years of everything generally going well, it's a shame.
I only maintain a few of WordPress blogs now, for family and friends, and I don't think I'll be recommending that they migrate away from it. But I certainly won't be adding any new ones or bothering updating any of my old plugins (not that I was going to anyway).