Interesting days for WordPress—Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, has announced that two big names in WordPress development are forking WordPress (this means that they’re taking a “snapshot” of WordPress as it is now and going off in a new direction with it). This is a benefit of open-source software—anyone can get under the hood and start making changes or improvements, creating their own version of the software over time.
Karim Marucchi and Joost de Valk are both big names in WordPress development, Joost being known primarily for his Yoast SEO plugin. Karim and Joost have decided that WordPress leadership (namely Matt Mullenweg acting unilaterally) is no longer serving the community properly and have decided to fork WordPress as JKPress (here is Joost’s statement, and here is Karim’s statement). JKPress will have a board of directors and will put into place many other key mechanisms to bring governance back to the developers who use WordPress.
How will all of this affect those of us who use WordPress every day? In the beginning, it won’t affect us much at all. But I’ll be very curious to watch JKPress develop and put market pressure on Matt and WordPress. I’ll keep you posted.
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