In a plot twist worthy of a tech thriller, Matt Mullenweg and Automattic have pulled off a digital sleight of hand that’s left the WordPress community slack-jawed. The target? None other than the beloved Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin. It seems Matt, in his infinite wisdom, decided that the plugin would be better off under his stewardship – never mind what its creators or millions of users might think.

With a few deft keystrokes, Matt essentially walked into the digital home of ACF, rearranged the furniture, and declared squatter’s rights. The plugin’s ‘slug’ – its unique identifier and the digital equivalent of a house key – now resides in Matt’s pocket. It’s like a high-stakes game of ‘finders keepers’ played out on the WordPress.org repository.

In a linguistic pirouette that would make politicians blush, Team Matt is calling this maneuver a ‘fork’. Because nothing says “legitimate open-source practice” quite like commandeering someone else’s user base overnight. It’s less a fork in the road and more a full-blown highway robbery.

This digital coup d’état means that millions of existing ACF installations worldwide have unwittingly found themselves pledging allegiance to Matt’s version of the plugin. Meanwhile, the original ACF team at WP Engine is left watching from the sidelines, their carefully crafted code now under new management. It’s like waking up to find your car’s been repossessed, except the repo man is now offering you a suspiciously similar vehicle with his logo on it.

Let’s not forget that ACF isn’t just a free plugin – it’s the gateway to a paid version. So, in essence, Matt didn’t just borrow the keys; he potentially rerouted the entire revenue stream. It’s like hijacking a lemonade stand and setting up shop right next to it with the same recipe.

This bold move marks a significant escalation in the ongoing WordPress soap opera. It’s raised more eyebrows than a Botox convention, sparking debates about the security of plugins, the balance of power in open-source communities, and whether “open-source” sometimes means “open season” for the powerful players in the field.

Public responses

This is totally crazy. Like if the operators of rubygems dot org just decided to expropriate the official Rails gems, hand over control to a new team, and lock the core team out of it. We’re in uncharted and dangerous territory for open source now. What a sad sight.

David Heinemeier Hansson

Some lines in the sand in OSS that cannot be crossed. Reputation built over decades destroyed over the past few weeks. –

Simon Chiu

I worked at Automattic for 5 years with some of the smartest & kindest people I’ve ever met – many I still consider friends But this latest action from

@photomatt is so dirty & underhanded I’m ashamed I ever worked there I would have taken the offer to leave 100%

Ian Nuttall