To me this is indistinguishable from an account takeover attack executed by an insider. I doubt any prosecutor would be interested, but to my eyes WordPress.org has violated the CFAA by accessing WordPress instances outside the bounds of their authorization. They were authorized to modify WordPress instances in ways ACF prescribed, not in ways of their own choosing.
I'm not saying I'd like to see Mullenweg in chains, I wouldn't. But WP.org's escalating legal exposure is really concerning. I feel like we're at risk of losing a cornerstone of the web. People are talking about a different open source CMS eating their lunch, but I think the more likely scenario is that people move to Square Space, Wix, Facebook, et cetera, and open source content management becomes niche.
IMO it's also notable that Mullenweg is in this state of mind and also has access to Tumblr data, with a history of allegedly doxxing the relationships between anonymous user blogs based on non-public information [0]. One doesn't need to agree with the moderation decision, or take sides on the political context around it, to understand that there is a tremendous amount of centralized power here, that norms are going out the window, and that an entire ecosystem is at risk.
In hindsight this should've been all the warning anyone needed.
In the future, when a BDFL telegraphs that they're willing to abuse their powers like this, we need to fork immediately. Open source is more important than any single project or any single BDFL. We can't allow open source to appear risky or unreliable relative to proprietary software, subject to the whims of volatile personalities.
Open source is kind of like libraries - an institution for the collective good people managed to erect in the past that would be neigh impossible to replicate today. Imagine convincing companies in any other industry to collaborate openly and freely with their competitors merely because it's good for society as a whole. You'd be labeled a socialist and laughed out of the room.
I doubt the case will make it to trial. I think they'll be settling in the next few weeks. But I did double check, and you're right of course, the complaint does allege they violated the CFAA when they cut off access from WP.org infrastructure.
Oh god, this gave me a minor heart attack. We are using over 20 ACF fields for 150+ sites. I thought it was completely out of the WordPress ecosystem. I am glad they have the zip download and continuing auto updates.
EDIT: I confirm our ACF plugins on sites are all switched to secure custom fields. This is so shady, it broke our snippets because we are using prepend and append texts to wrap our field values. Now they are all broken and we have to update all our sites (also our client's sites). Let's see what comes next...
EDIT2: There goes my Sunday. I received our first ticket regarding broken homepage widgets. I have to sit down and update every site one by one. Thank you Matt Mullenweg for ruining my Sunday plans.
This should be the top comment. It's already scary for a package manager to take control of a community package, even more so when sites auto-update to new code... but to break existing sites by completely changing the code that is provided in an auto-update is beyond the pale.
Not a lawyer, but I imagine many consultancies will be talking to lawyers about this one; there are entire sections of law about interfering with other companies' contracts with each other. At minimum it's an appalling breach of trust.
(community member, not affiliated with WP, WPE, or A8C)
I can confirm this has been escalated internally in the WP slack.
I can also provide this context which I found concerning, given the way this was taken over and rolled out on a Saturday afternoon, of which I have also been dragged into now as a fellow site maintainer.
- Matt Mullenweg
"in a few days we'll have a Github where people can get involved, and we can also set up proper build systems, etc"
So its all in flux obviously. I let them know the same thing, that I find this as a malicious supply chain attack that is affecting the community.
I’d love to hear how he justifies taking away this engineers’ Sunday? I doubt this person is the only person working this weekend due to Matt’s theft of ACF
> I’d love to hear how he justifies taking away this engineers’ Sunday?
His posts on slack [1] show that he sees it as "either with us or against us", and he's willing to harm users to force them to choose a side instead of staying neutral. He probably hopes that people will blame WP Engine for it.
I think his real goal is tortious interference. Hurting devs who use ACF is just a bonus.
Install the official free plugin from the advanced custom fields website and remove the SCF version. You won’t need to change any existing code then, and future updates will come from the plugin dev for ACF.
That's where the Sunday goes. I am trying to create an FTP script to mass update all wp-content plugins for this single package. It was on my mind but I was not expecting to have something bizarre happening from WordPress for one of the most crucial plugins in WordPress' existence.
No one should risk an unknown entity taking illegal control of a key plugin on their site. I can't imagine anyone wanting WP.org to weaponize more plugins on their site.
Are you being sarcastic or a jerk?
No issues? At least 50 deleted reviews spoke for themselves!
Yeah, you didn’t produce any “technical” issues other than now maintaining a plugin that isn’t yours to start with, gathering thousands of positive reviews that aren’t yours, and selling it as a security fix which you didn’t fix.
I don’t understand how you can even show your face in public.
You and your fellow matticians are a shame to the entire open source community.
How did the sites auto-update to have this plug-in removed/replaced? Are your sites set up to just automatically take push updates from WordPress central command or something and auto-modify themselves?!
Wordpress has a (highly effective) auto-updates mechanism for security patches.
It was extended a couple of years ago to automatically apply plugin updates for you if you opted in, and I think automatic plugin updates may now be the default.
(This is on balance a good thing; almost all WP vulnerabilities are outdated plugins, and until this mechanism was prevalent, WordPress occasionally had to live-patch existing installations of third party plugins in the case of severe vulnerabilities.)
The reason this nasty little takeover worked is that they (Matt, whoever helped) have stolen ACF's slug (advanced-custom-fields). So as far as the updater is concerned, it's just another plugin update to the same code base.
WP and/or A8C took over the existing plugin, so that sites that have auto-update on were automatically bumped to the SCF version instead of the historical ACF which obviously had a different team of maintainers
I don't think anything about our update could cause the issues he describes and we've had no other reports, this is the only claim on the internet, and doesn't include enough technical details to tell if it's an actual bug or not.
If it's a bug, our bad and we'll fix ASAP. If it's a bug, it's a very rare one. There have been 225k downloads of the SCF plugin in the past 24 hours, implying a lot of updates. I would estimate at least 60% of the sites with auto-upgrade on and using .org for updates have done so already. https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/advance...
That said, I'm happy to pay system2 whatever he thinks his time was "spent" on a Sunday is worth. Just let me know an amount and where to send. You can contact me here: https://ma.tt/contact/ .
We use ACF with WP Code auto insert. ACF has prepend and append (in presentation tab) and this can be used to wrap the value with classes or other tags such as IDs, JS or others. When the ACF name changed, the prepend and append broke because prepend/append text showing must be configured in functions.php like this:
At the heart of this - if you consider it generously - is a principle that we can possibly all sign up to, namely that "large commercial entities" should (should from a moral, not legal standpoint) "pay back" to the open source software that makes them money.
The principle however has been totally undermined by MM's actions, which have been completely out of line. His behaviour has been abhorrent. I've been shocked (possibly naively) that a single individual could have such huge power over an open source project that they could literally turn it off (referring here to the update mechanism that WPEngine was using).
I've been even more shocked and appalled by this plugin takeover. ACF is a central piece of pretty much all WP developers' / agencies toolkit. Those of us who have been in this game a long time remember WP before it, and the breath of fresh air that it was to finally be able to define complex relationships between posts and provide our users with a GUI that actually worked well for complicated sites. ACF have pushed and supported this technology for years and years - firstly under the expertise of Elliot Condon, now under the aegis of WPEngine. I know some of the developer team at ACF personally - they're excellent people, making brilliant code, and most of them are putting huge efforts into WP as an open source project even aside from their efforts in maintaining and extending ACF.
The forking of a plugin is one thing. A fair way to do this would be to fork it, and start from zero installs. Automattic could have done that, promoted the hell out of "SCF" and got users in a way that was at least slightly (?) fair.
Simply switching the name and keeping the slug - and thus the 2+million sites - should be thought of as theft. It's outrageous, it's totally petty, and I so far haven't seen a single person being supportive of this (probably?) unilateral action by one - apparently increasingly unhinged - individual.
The wider problem of course is the effect this has on the vibrant WP ecosystem which as someone else in this thread has pointed out is a critical (erstwhile) open cornerstone of the web.
I am still hoping that this will subside into history and it'll all sort but it has left me and many WP devs I know with a pretty bitter taste.
The irony of this move is that his main argument to keep people on his side over this has been that WP Engine has not been contributing. He's been saying over and over that he's doing this because they're not giving back.
Now, when he's already failed to bring the community on board with his attacks, he decides that his next move is to make a big show of stealing something that had he done nothing many people would not have realized was a WP Engine property, with the net effect of reminding people that WP Engine has been responsible for maintaining what is widely considered to be the most essential plugin in the ecosystem.
But that doesn't count as giving back because... reasons.
> Now, when he's already failed to bring the community on board with his attacks, he decides that his next move is to make a big show of stealing something that had he done nothing many people would not have realized was a WP Engine property, with the net effect of reminding people that WP Engine has been responsible for maintaining what is widely considered to be the most essential plugin in the ecosystem.
> But that doesn't count as giving back because... reasons.
I haven't used WordPress in years, but I've seen recent comments saying that WP Engine has been using ACF to market their hosting packages, even giving customers a "4 month trial" — not something a hosting provider really wants to see.
A reasonable standard for the plugin infrastructure would be to charge and allow free access to people with sufficient contribution history.
So Matt’s company which has sufficient contribution history would get free access and WP engine could either pay for access, contribute more to WordPress, or make their own plug-in infrastructure.
"large commercial entities" should (should from a moral, not legal standpoint) "pay back" to the open source software that makes them money.
...
I know some of the developer team at ACF personally - they're excellent people, making brilliant code, and most of them are putting huge efforts into WP as an open source project even aside from their efforts in maintaining and extending ACF.
The ACF team wiring that open source ACF code are on WP Engine's payroll.
1. Free software is an ideological battleground, and as long as you abide by the license you're fine. Most GNU packages.
2. Open Source without a single backing entity is a meritocracy (or tries, sometimes a little too hard) and you can help improve it for everyone. Like the Kernel.
3. Open Source from a single backing entity is an insurance policy against that company failing or overcharging - at least in principle - if that works is often up to adoption, see the state of various Hashicorp products and their forks. You'll also never get your PR merged if it isn't critical, you aren't a customer or the PR misaligns with the company's strategy. I've even seen this happen on an Apache project, so that's not a guarantee of being group 1 or 2.
Matt has always pretended he belongs to group 1 with incidentally aligned commercial interest, but it turns out WordPress is group 3 with a server dependency twist. He wouldn't even approve a config constant to change the default update/catalog endpoints.
The official wp announcement of this said “we don’t plan on doing this to other plugins.” lol. anyone think they pinky promise? More like: build on Wordpress and unless you kiss the ring some guy named Matt will disappear your business.
Exactly. He also ends his post with a "separate" boast about poaching one if WPE's engineers. It's so obvious that this is just a giant FU to WPE and nothing else
Wow, this is a big deal. Matt Mullenweg taking over ACF like that? Not cool. It's not just about messing with years of hard work, but think about all those WordPress sites now running code the ACF team didn't approve. Kinda scary when you think about it. Hope this doesn't become a trend in the open-source world.
WP engine never modified WordPress. They took stock Wordpress and edited a configuration file to disable revisions. They didn’t actually change any code.
Matt might pontificate about "bastardizing and messing with" WordPress, but this is what he is actually referring to:
A. Single. Configuration. Option.
A. Changed. Default.
Post revisions are a configuration option in the admin panel. They are enabled by default. Some hosting providers (and I expect WPE is not the only one) set it to disabled by default.
That's it.
This is not remotely comparable.
Even without the ACF situation, Matt's description of WPE bastardizing the fundamental offering of WordPress is asinine at best, actively deceptive at worst (and that's where we seem to be, so far).
This is particularly bananas as ACF is basically table stakes for doing anything beyond blogging. I’d assume most websites that make actual money are thoroughly dependent on it.
To twist the knife on a personal spat, Mullenweg just blew up uncountable businesses on a double-holiday weekend. At this point, seriously, fuck that guy.
> This is particularly bananas as ACF is basically table stakes for doing anything beyond blogging.
Not sure about this.
I'd assume most Wordpress sites that make actual money are dependent on WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, and maybe Gravity Forms/WP Forms for member subscriptions.
None of these are reliant on ACF, and there's any number of WP plugins like this that do the whole job of some website niche or other.
(I've been doing bespoke WP builds for at least a decade -- first one probably more like 14 years ago actually -- and I've not used ACF a single time. There has always been an alternative, and for a developer it's a bad choice.)
Either way: I don't think ACF's popularity is the major factor here. It's that it's an outright abuse.
The word "gaslighting" gets overused but it applies quite well to what ACF free plugin users are experiencing here.
As to "blew up": I am not sure how many money-making ACF users this has affected, because they tend to use ACF Pro, which is a separate download.
What appears to have been removed from ACF to make this shady SCF nonsense is the upsell marketing. Not sure what other breakage there would/could have been. I have seen people say things have broken but I suspect they are relatively minor issues caused by the actual ACF security patch which is also shipped here... because they haven't changed much.
Though if Secure Custom Fields is getting the blame for the breakage, that's kismet, karma, whatever you want to call it.
There are plenty of uses for WordPress for marcom sites for Fortune 500 brands that don't use those sites for transactional revenue, but they serve millions of impressions a month that rely on ACF. This is a supply chain attack. The security discussions with client IT groups happening this week are going to be a much bigger deal than they were last week.
The erratic and bizarre behavior of the BDFL that runs WordPress and Automattic has proven himself untrustworthy and is causing massive damage to the WordPress ecosystem.
Counterpoint. Just have a look how many times ACF is mentioned (for example) in this thread [0]. ACF is massively popular. The fact you've never used it, for as long as you've been involved, is extraordinarily rare. I'm really surprised to hear you say that (but good for you if you've got the time and chops to never resort to it! That's awesome).
Fair enough. My info might be a little out of date from my web agency chop shop days, but I do recall that for essentially any substantial site it was assumed from day 1 that it would involve an ACF install. Probably integrated it into… fifty(?) websites over the years. I don’t recall the value prop of Pro, and I actually don’t think I ever touched it myself.
The whole thing is https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/3167679/advance... it's very close to functionality wise right now to ACF. Not identical, already. While I am not a lawyer it almost certainly violates the ACF trademark as the code and reviews contains a lot of reference to ACF and the Advanced Custom Fields trademark which is literally the project slug. Some suspect a request for emergency injunction might follow next week. And most certainly it also violates community trust very, very big time.
This on top of the "swear fealty" checkbox on login which caused multiple high profile contributors to leave and now shut the accessibility team down https://i.imgur.com/0jCZnlm.png
Readit News
I'm not saying I'd like to see Mullenweg in chains, I wouldn't. But WP.org's escalating legal exposure is really concerning. I feel like we're at risk of losing a cornerstone of the web. People are talking about a different open source CMS eating their lunch, but I think the more likely scenario is that people move to Square Space, Wix, Facebook, et cetera, and open source content management becomes niche.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...
In the future, when a BDFL telegraphs that they're willing to abuse their powers like this, we need to fork immediately. Open source is more important than any single project or any single BDFL. We can't allow open source to appear risky or unreliable relative to proprietary software, subject to the whims of volatile personalities.
Open source is kind of like libraries - an institution for the collective good people managed to erect in the past that would be neigh impossible to replicate today. Imagine convincing companies in any other industry to collaborate openly and freely with their competitors merely because it's good for society as a whole. You'd be labeled a socialist and laughed out of the room.
If we lose it, it's probably gone for good.
EDIT: I confirm our ACF plugins on sites are all switched to secure custom fields. This is so shady, it broke our snippets because we are using prepend and append texts to wrap our field values. Now they are all broken and we have to update all our sites (also our client's sites). Let's see what comes next...
EDIT2: There goes my Sunday. I received our first ticket regarding broken homepage widgets. I have to sit down and update every site one by one. Thank you Matt Mullenweg for ruining my Sunday plans.
Not a lawyer, but I imagine many consultancies will be talking to lawyers about this one; there are entire sections of law about interfering with other companies' contracts with each other. At minimum it's an appalling breach of trust.
I can confirm this has been escalated internally in the WP slack.
I can also provide this context which I found concerning, given the way this was taken over and rolled out on a Saturday afternoon, of which I have also been dragged into now as a fellow site maintainer.
- Matt Mullenweg "in a few days we'll have a Github where people can get involved, and we can also set up proper build systems, etc"
So its all in flux obviously. I let them know the same thing, that I find this as a malicious supply chain attack that is affecting the community.
I’d love to hear how he justifies taking away this engineers’ Sunday? I doubt this person is the only person working this weekend due to Matt’s theft of ACF
His posts on slack [1] show that he sees it as "either with us or against us", and he's willing to harm users to force them to choose a side instead of staying neutral. He probably hopes that people will blame WP Engine for it.
I think his real goal is tortious interference. Hurting devs who use ACF is just a bonus.
[1] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1843963052183433331.html
It would be fantastic if people could open a topic there or a thread on Slack if they face any issues.
Update ACF and stay secure against this latest threat. https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/installing-and-upg...
Yeah, you didn’t produce any “technical” issues other than now maintaining a plugin that isn’t yours to start with, gathering thousands of positive reviews that aren’t yours, and selling it as a security fix which you didn’t fix.
I don’t understand how you can even show your face in public. You and your fellow matticians are a shame to the entire open source community.
It was extended a couple of years ago to automatically apply plugin updates for you if you opted in, and I think automatic plugin updates may now be the default.
(This is on balance a good thing; almost all WP vulnerabilities are outdated plugins, and until this mechanism was prevalent, WordPress occasionally had to live-patch existing installations of third party plugins in the case of severe vulnerabilities.)
The reason this nasty little takeover worked is that they (Matt, whoever helped) have stolen ACF's slug (advanced-custom-fields). So as far as the updater is concerned, it's just another plugin update to the same code base.
And in fact, very little has changed.
If it's a bug, our bad and we'll fix ASAP. If it's a bug, it's a very rare one. There have been 225k downloads of the SCF plugin in the past 24 hours, implying a lot of updates. I would estimate at least 60% of the sites with auto-upgrade on and using .org for updates have done so already. https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/advance...
That said, I'm happy to pay system2 whatever he thinks his time was "spent" on a Sunday is worth. Just let me know an amount and where to send. You can contact me here: https://ma.tt/contact/ .
Did they also rename filters and functions? I thought it was only the name and mentions of ACF in the docs. What did you rely on?
add_filter('acf/format_value/name=mysnippet1', 'mysnippet1acf', 20, 3);
function mysnippet1acf ($value, $post_id, $field) {
}Long story short, if you are using ACF with advanced features, including logic and presentation, this hostile takeover breaks it.
Doesn't even matter if you use prepend/append for the fields, our logic-based ACF fields are also broken.
Deleted Comment
If they’re actively breaking people’s sites I’d hope they can get an emergency injunction ASAP, and maybe someone can start a CFAA investigation.
At the heart of this - if you consider it generously - is a principle that we can possibly all sign up to, namely that "large commercial entities" should (should from a moral, not legal standpoint) "pay back" to the open source software that makes them money.
The principle however has been totally undermined by MM's actions, which have been completely out of line. His behaviour has been abhorrent. I've been shocked (possibly naively) that a single individual could have such huge power over an open source project that they could literally turn it off (referring here to the update mechanism that WPEngine was using).
I've been even more shocked and appalled by this plugin takeover. ACF is a central piece of pretty much all WP developers' / agencies toolkit. Those of us who have been in this game a long time remember WP before it, and the breath of fresh air that it was to finally be able to define complex relationships between posts and provide our users with a GUI that actually worked well for complicated sites. ACF have pushed and supported this technology for years and years - firstly under the expertise of Elliot Condon, now under the aegis of WPEngine. I know some of the developer team at ACF personally - they're excellent people, making brilliant code, and most of them are putting huge efforts into WP as an open source project even aside from their efforts in maintaining and extending ACF.
The forking of a plugin is one thing. A fair way to do this would be to fork it, and start from zero installs. Automattic could have done that, promoted the hell out of "SCF" and got users in a way that was at least slightly (?) fair.
Simply switching the name and keeping the slug - and thus the 2+million sites - should be thought of as theft. It's outrageous, it's totally petty, and I so far haven't seen a single person being supportive of this (probably?) unilateral action by one - apparently increasingly unhinged - individual.
The wider problem of course is the effect this has on the vibrant WP ecosystem which as someone else in this thread has pointed out is a critical (erstwhile) open cornerstone of the web.
I am still hoping that this will subside into history and it'll all sort but it has left me and many WP devs I know with a pretty bitter taste.
Now, when he's already failed to bring the community on board with his attacks, he decides that his next move is to make a big show of stealing something that had he done nothing many people would not have realized was a WP Engine property, with the net effect of reminding people that WP Engine has been responsible for maintaining what is widely considered to be the most essential plugin in the ecosystem.
But that doesn't count as giving back because... reasons.
> But that doesn't count as giving back because... reasons.
I haven't used WordPress in years, but I've seen recent comments saying that WP Engine has been using ACF to market their hosting packages, even giving customers a "4 month trial" — not something a hosting provider really wants to see.
So Matt’s company which has sufficient contribution history would get free access and WP engine could either pay for access, contribute more to WordPress, or make their own plug-in infrastructure.
...
I know some of the developer team at ACF personally - they're excellent people, making brilliant code, and most of them are putting huge efforts into WP as an open source project even aside from their efforts in maintaining and extending ACF.
The ACF team wiring that open source ACF code are on WP Engine's payroll.
He probably is trying to make a point what WPEngine is doing (based on his own perspective)
https://wordpress.org/about/
There are certain implied rules to FOSS:
1. Free software is an ideological battleground, and as long as you abide by the license you're fine. Most GNU packages.
2. Open Source without a single backing entity is a meritocracy (or tries, sometimes a little too hard) and you can help improve it for everyone. Like the Kernel.
3. Open Source from a single backing entity is an insurance policy against that company failing or overcharging - at least in principle - if that works is often up to adoption, see the state of various Hashicorp products and their forks. You'll also never get your PR merged if it isn't critical, you aren't a customer or the PR misaligns with the company's strategy. I've even seen this happen on an Apache project, so that's not a guarantee of being group 1 or 2.
Matt has always pretended he belongs to group 1 with incidentally aligned commercial interest, but it turns out WordPress is group 3 with a server dependency twist. He wouldn't even approve a config constant to change the default update/catalog endpoints.
https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/secure-custom-fields/
> Hey @WordPress. Are there any further plugins that we can expect to be forked?
> There are no others we're aware of at this time, but you are welcome to suggest some.
WordPress.org modified third party WordPress installations.
Matt might pontificate about "bastardizing and messing with" WordPress, but this is what he is actually referring to:
A. Single. Configuration. Option.
A. Changed. Default.
Post revisions are a configuration option in the admin panel. They are enabled by default. Some hosting providers (and I expect WPE is not the only one) set it to disabled by default.
That's it.
This is not remotely comparable.
Even without the ACF situation, Matt's description of WPE bastardizing the fundamental offering of WordPress is asinine at best, actively deceptive at worst (and that's where we seem to be, so far).
To twist the knife on a personal spat, Mullenweg just blew up uncountable businesses on a double-holiday weekend. At this point, seriously, fuck that guy.
Not sure about this.
I'd assume most Wordpress sites that make actual money are dependent on WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, and maybe Gravity Forms/WP Forms for member subscriptions.
None of these are reliant on ACF, and there's any number of WP plugins like this that do the whole job of some website niche or other.
(I've been doing bespoke WP builds for at least a decade -- first one probably more like 14 years ago actually -- and I've not used ACF a single time. There has always been an alternative, and for a developer it's a bad choice.)
Either way: I don't think ACF's popularity is the major factor here. It's that it's an outright abuse.
The word "gaslighting" gets overused but it applies quite well to what ACF free plugin users are experiencing here.
As to "blew up": I am not sure how many money-making ACF users this has affected, because they tend to use ACF Pro, which is a separate download.
What appears to have been removed from ACF to make this shady SCF nonsense is the upsell marketing. Not sure what other breakage there would/could have been. I have seen people say things have broken but I suspect they are relatively minor issues caused by the actual ACF security patch which is also shipped here... because they haven't changed much.
Though if Secure Custom Fields is getting the blame for the breakage, that's kismet, karma, whatever you want to call it.
The erratic and bizarre behavior of the BDFL that runs WordPress and Automattic has proven himself untrustworthy and is causing massive damage to the WordPress ecosystem.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1cc0aor/what_are...
I might be wrong, but as best I can tell from some quick searching, ACF is the most mentioned.
All of them used ACF for custom article types, testimonial types, carousels, and other random one-off “content-types”
Not trying to debate against you, just adding that wordpress usage is so wide
Given how widely used ACF is, it wouldn't be surprising to learn that a lot of weekends were ruined by the "fork".
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41830709
(160 points, 23 hours ago, 174 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821336
(383 points, 23 hours ago, 188 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821400
This on top of the "swear fealty" checkbox on login which caused multiple high profile contributors to leave and now shut the accessibility team down https://i.imgur.com/0jCZnlm.png
See this video at the 3:49 mark - https://youtu.be/qFlORU3NGX0?si=_AHQIT4V7LKvecBH&t=229