[bigiain]

And companies like WHM/cPanel and Plesk - who provide 1 click Wordpress installs for a huge number of otherwise non-Wordpress specialist web hosting companies.

I'd guess a _huge_ part of WordPress's "customer acquisition" comes from small businesses who started out on cheap shared hosting for their email/dns/website using cPanel or Plesk (or similar). That's clearly a big market, given how much Wix and SquareSpace spend advertising for it.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn cPanel had as many WordPress using customers as WPEngine - and it's now owned by PE as well.

> A real community-owned fork could quickly get a lot of traction.

I suspect a WordPress fork developed by a consortium of companies who offer Wp as a Service? Perhaps a having them all fund a non-profit Mozilla like foundation (well, Mozilla circa 2015, before they decided to become and AI and Ad company who's apparent goal is to attract more and more sketchy grifting C level execs and make them rich).

[runako]

> I wouldn't be surprised to learn cPanel had as many WordPress using customers as WPEngine - and it's now owned by PE as well.

I would bet that WPE is not nearly the largest WP host by # of sites. Bluehost, for ex, is claiming millions of WP sites.

> WordPress fork developed by a consortium of companies who offer Wp as a Service

Exactly this. And folks working in the broader ecosystem (themes, plugins, retailers of the above, potentially contract WP developers as they also have to use trademarked terms in marketing) also have an incentive to work with such a fork.

MariaDB is a solid example of a community fork taking root when the corporate owner became perceived as being unstable.