WordPress retaliation impacts community
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It is too early to say what the outcome will be in the ongoing fight between Automattic and WP Engine, but the WordPress community at large is already the loser. Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg has been using his control of the project, and the WordPress.org infrastructure, to punish WP Engine and remove some dissenting contributors from discussion channels. Most recently, Mullenweg has instituted a hostile fork of a WP Engine plugin and the forked plugin is replacing the original via WordPress updates.
In the beginning of the Automattic and WP Engine spat, many people hoped that the companies would ratchet down the hostilities—or at least leave it to lawyers to sort out while leaving the larger community out of it. Those hopes have gone unrealized.
