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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

WordPress and Mullenweg are one and the same, despite all of the superficial distinctions and organizations. He controls it all.

There is no viable way to separate without forking the project and using a different name. Mullenweg is already trying to make like difficult for anyone he suspects might be thinking about forking, so anyone leading a fork has to assume that Mullenweg is going to make their life hell. He’s not afraid of dumping money into lawsuits to crush people, so forking WP is a scary proposition.

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Given the risks, it would likely have to be done by a foundation with deep pockets and clout in the community. I could see an org like EFF do the work, they have the clout that any attacks against them would fall flat and they probably have deep enough pockets too.

Besides an org like that that would do it for ideological reasons, the only other party would be some large org that is deeply invested in the WP ecosystem. I imagine there is some ecomm giant that's probably got 8 or 9 figures sunk into WP, for them it would be worthwhile to fork as it would likely be cheaper than migrating to another solution, but that's a hard maybe because you would need the right org with the right set of priorities to take on something like this.

All of this is just pure speculation, if I'm being honest I find it unlikely that either scenario plays out in the real world.

I hope EFF have more important things to do than forking a php cms. It's popular but not important IMO

Thinking Apache, Mozilla, FSF or Linux foundation would be better stewards than EFF.

Counting income + assets - liabilities - expenses:

Mozilla ~142.7 million https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...

Linux Foundation ~136 million https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...

Apache has ~4.25 million based on https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/470...

FSF - 902k if I did the math right on this (ouch) https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/428...

Not sure I'd trust FSF to steward a project. Apache could but it feels like they're almost a graveyard.

Also not sure I'd want Linux to control it based on the latest Chrome/Google dealings.

Not a huge fan of Mozilla, but it's somewhat in their wheelhouse, at least.

What else is there for tech non-profits and dev stewardship of something like this?

So it’s the end of Wordpress, within a decade if it continues at its current trajectory.

Drupal community to benefit here tremendously. As well as consultant work to migrate away from WP

Drupal has spent at least the last ~9 months positioning for this with the 'Drupal CMS'/'Starshot' product development initiative.

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