This is so bizarre. I saw this first on the Automattic blog: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/spoon/
It’s curious why Matt Mullenweg would be hyping this up when it contains “WP” in the name, like WP Engine. “FreeWP” sounds just as much like something that would cause brand confusion.
Also, the FreeWP announcement post seems like a manifesto to remove Matt from stewardship of WordPress and to start some sort of class action lawsuit. With bits like:
“On the legal front, I’ve secured a suite of domains for WP Class Action. This independent initiative aims to address the issues plaguing our community head-on.”
“Change isn’t just coming — it’s here. Consider this your wake-up call to those who’ve held the reins for too long. FreeWP stands ready to ensures WordPress remains free, open, and genuinely community-centric.”
This isn't even a fork—looking at the text on this site, I think it's just this guy Vinny deliberately trolling Matt by registering a bunch of WP domains and flaunting them. If so, he succeeded at the goal of provoking an asinine response from WordPress.org (aka Matt).
From the author [0]:
> I love how I never said I was going to fork the project and only wanted to support those who did. Matt is incredible at only hearing the things he wants to hear.
See the FAQ for more evidence that this is mostly just Vinny trolling so far [1]:
> Well, what does ‘wp’ mean?
> We found some notes referencing “word processing” and “web publishing,” and there’s even a mention of Wendell Pierce, who played Detective William ‘Bunk’ Moreland in the popular HBO series The Wire. It seems to be related to one of those topics.
> It’s also rumored the singsongy vibes really sealed the deal.
I am not sure who is trolling who here. Maybe they both are trying to troll each other, but both don't really look great.
FreeWP seems like a completely meritless attempt at a fork / initiative. Potentially even just an attempt by "Vinny" to move himself into the spotlight. And the WordPress community, for a big part, looks still very novice and in-experienced and a decent junk of community members might fall for this and put at least some (and more than they should) eggs into that basket.
Matt just seems to troll and knows that "FreeWP" is no competition at all. And continues on his path of eccentric and very weird behavior.
It's not a fork. I'm "Vinny," and I've been a part of other communities outside of WordPress. Matt seems to be very concerned about it because while the site is just a placeholder, the real work is organizing the community, which I know he knows I am doing.
> FreeWP seems like a completely meritless attempt at a fork / initiative. Potentially even just an attempt by "Vinny" to move himself into the spotlight.
This is why I think it's a troll—it's so completely devoid of substance that I think it must be deliberately void, and getting Matt to respond was the only point. The OP specifically says they don't intend to fork, and they have a goofy FAQ with an intentionally-absent mission statement.
The issue with WP Engine isn't the WP in the name. That's fine and part of how WordPress wants it. The issue is they use the word WordPress to define the services they provide. Which is why it's completely bonkers that there is a trademark dispute since they provide managed Wordpress hosting so using WordPress to describe providing WordPress hosting is normal and expected.
No, they updated the trademark policy to call out WP Engine specifically with a petulant mini-rant:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks
This goes with my view that Matt is technically correct almost all the time, which is the best kind of correct. https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/909991-futurama
Thanks to that, I normally find consistency in what he says. The forking post about FreeWP makes sense.
Especially because there is some amount of joking in both freewp.com and the post. I like how Matt refers to him as a former WordPress community member.
I'm not a lawyer but the lack of donating is not grounds for a copyright violation. Part of having a copyright is defending it. This is why we occasional see a Goliath beat up on a David. If Goliath lets the David slide it could undermine Goliath's status as actively defending his copyright.
In fact, Matt shoots himself in the foot. You don't become a billion dollar company overnight. Zero to thousands. Thousands to hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands to millions. Silence all the way. But billions and it becomes a copyright violation??
That's so ridiculous that only the stupid or the insane would believe it. Or both.
But this isn't about copyright. It's Matt looking for revenue and then manufacturing a flimsy excuse to demand money. Up to recently most of the WP Community drank the MM Kool Aid. That's not the case any more.
Trademark, not copyright.
Copyright can’t be extinguished by common use. Trademarks can.
Wordpress has consistently said that “WP” is fair game, but that leaning on “Wordpress” is not.
They used to, until the WP Engine fight began. The trademark policy was updated a few days after Matt started publicly beefing with them. There’s now the following on the trademark policy page: https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.That seems clear and consistent to me; they’re not saying you can’t use “WP”, just asking that people avoid confusing users.
They said that consistently right up until they changed the trademark policy to call out WP Engine by name:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
"Consistently" is not an adverb I would associate with Automattic/WordPress.org/WordPress Foundation/Matt's behavior in recent months.
I feel like ClassicPress[^1] is a bit of a better approach to the whole "I just want basic Wordpress that works" - It seems like it's pretty stable and already has a community behind it.
The thing is, the current version of Gutenberg is not a bad editor for writers and editors and absolutely the way WordPress needs to go to stay relevant. If Matt did one thing right in the last couple of years, it was realizing that. The way he went about it, seems to have been not always the greatest, but it's an absolute must.
And ClassicPress is the fork of Gutenberg deniers who think a, now, below-average WYSIWYG editor is the way... or...
all the alternative "Page Builders", which are in itself a multi million dollar business, and are horrible usability & code-wise. The two newer big ones, Brick and Breakdance seem fine, but are much more complete website builders than editors. And also something that you don't want end-users to touch.
Don't see that fork being the future.
Since we're here - what are people using these days to prop a quick web property up for a friend, for example, that's not such a PITA?
I recently told a friend I'd throw up a site for him for his dog grooming business, and naturally went to WP. I figured I'd just a simple free theme that was close and modify it to my liking if possible and it was anything but trivial. Free basic themes take a lot of digging to find, they're built on two(?) Wordpress theme-builders, or maybe some other proprietary theme, often include other weird addons, etc... I don't remember it being so convoluted- but I guess I am getting old in this space.
I send friends + family to Squarespace for simple websites, or Shopify for e-commerce. Works well!.
Squarespace has design templates, a gallery of blocks, domains (what's a DNS?), news section, email marketing, signup forms etc. all built-in making it easy and one-stop
Shopify is Shopify and doesn't need much of an introduction.
Squarespace is comically overpriced for a simple site. I don't understand why people recommend it so soften for "non-technical family member needs an essentially static site."
The https://neocities.org/supporter tier gets you a custom domain for $5/mo and is as usable as MySpace. https://zume.net/ gets you WordPress for $5/mo which makes for a quick migration.
If you’re looking for something low effort but nice looking, Squarespace does a nice job. It can be frustrating if you’re trying to do something really custom — though you can likely make it happen if you’re stubborn enough.
If you’re looking for something you can really build from the ground up easily with, then my go-to is Craft CMS. You need to do things by hand, but it’s easy to build out data models, and the system is sane and easy to predict.
I'll add to the chorus in favor of Squarespace.
A few years back I helped my 70-year-old father-in-law (who's not remotely technical) get set up with a Squarespace site for a project of his and after initial configuration he was able to run it himself for years. At the time the big reason why I picked it over WordPress was that I knew that I'd be on the hook for maintaining a WordPress site. He just needed something he could post on occasionally and mostly forget about, and Squarespace worked great for that.
Ask one of the ai tools like stackblitz or v0 or cursor or replit or ... and deploy to whatever the default thing it for them.
I'd look at Squarespace first, and then Webflow.
This is all really cringe to see. The fact that 50% of websites run this is something else.
They should make a reality tv show about the OSS community would have been less predictable than "Days of our lifes" and would have even more staying power.
god this is cringe over cringe
It must be horrible working for Automattic at the moment having to deal with this seemingly never ending farce.
On a more serious note, given that a triple-digit number of employees have taken buyouts over Matt's behavior, it must really suck to be one of the employees who now has to do other people's jobs in addition to their own.
If I worked for Automattic, I'd take a buyout even if I didn't object to Matt's behavior, just because I know how much it always sucks to be one of the employees stuck at a company after a walkout or a layoff.
To be fair, it's not accurate to assume or even imply they left because of Matt's behaviour. As even you go on to say, the incentive to leave - full stop - was there. Why not take advantage of the opportunity?
The whole "but once you leave there will be a Scarlett Letter on your HR folder's head (i.e., you will never be allowed back)" just sounded silly. Who knew Matt was a Taylor Swift fan?
I mean, isn't the entire problem related to the fact that most of WordPress core development is still getting funded by Automattic? That's why a fork doesn't really matter, the resources to build WordPress seem to mostly come from one source. Even players with a lot more resources like WP Engine didn't or couldn't work a lot on WordPress so I'd be surprised if a random fork would matter.
Matt posted about FreeWP on WordPress.org labelling it a fork: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/spoon/
Yet, per the author, it is not a fork: https://x.com/vinnysgreen/status/1844488053060141233
“I love how I never said I was going to fork the project and only wanted to support those who did. Matt is incredible at only hearing the things he wants to hear.”
Matt is… trolling? by labelling FreeWP a fork.
He must really want people to think I am forking the project. Is he trying to cause confusion? He hates that, so it must be something else.
Is there a good TL; DR for what's going on with Matt, Silver Lake, WordPress and this?
What exactly are "WP2" and "WP Class Action"?
Just some domains the community can have. They seem to be so important to all this.
After all, isn't domains/trademarks/IP the reason why Matt feels he can lord over the .org as if it doesn't belong to the community and should be controlled by a robust foundation?
I presume WP2 is a play on Automattic's P2 theme, now also available on WP.com
I already didn’t like Wordpress and would recommend against it just because of maintenance issues but this drama is a whole new layer of something else.