WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg says a fork would be ‘fantastic’

WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Wednesday, said he’s not worried that the recent legal drama between his company, Automattic, and WordPress host WP Engine may lead to a fork of the open source WordPress software. In fact, he said, he’d welcome it.

“There might be a fork. I mean, we’ve had WordPress forks before — probably about three or four times in the history [of WordPress],” Mullenweg said in response to a question about whether he was worried about the potential of a fork. “That’s one of the beautiful things about open source is that there can be a fork.”

The Automattic CEO also suggested that rival WP Engine essentially had already forked the software because the version it runs is “very, very different” from what the WordPress core is today. If WordPress was then officially forked as a result of this growing discontent with his direction of the community and the legal battle over the use of the WordPress trademark, Mullenweg suggested that would be the better path.

“I think that’d be fantastic, actually. So people can have alternative governance or an alternative approach,” he noted.

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