[hedgehog]

Forking the code is easy, forking the infrastructure and community not so much. It would be a lot of work and with an apparently capricious founder any splinter project has a high likelihood of getting bogged down in drama. My guess is no code fork gets traction, business continues mostly as usual but the supporting service providers and dev ecosystem start moving to alternatives that have more stable governance. Eventually this means the de facto death of WP as a brand and technology.

This is all avoidable if Matt can restore confidence in WP's governance and give the community a sense of a positive vision for the future. That would probably have the side effect of being financially beneficial to Automattic and bring WPEngine into the major contributor fold.

I'm not sure how likely the good version of this is but for everyone's sake I hope WP ends up with some kind of positive resolution.

[immibis]

Look what happened to freenode: everyone just migrated to exactly the same thing but without the crazy guy or the trademark. WPEngine could fork WordPress, call it WPEngine, they're probably already halfway done scraping the plugin repository.

[johannes1234321]

Freenodenis/was a small thing used by quite technical people. WordPress is very different.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#/media/File%3AIRC_t... - this shows 100k Users before the fall and libera taking over about half of them.

[type0]

freenode wasn't a software project, infrastructure - yes, community - yes, but there's no wordpress community without the software