Free Software is About Collaboration
WordPress limits it
Collaboration - not just sharing - is at the heart of the Free (as in freedom) software movement. Those are not the same thing because one sole developer ("author") can share his or her code without collaborating with anyone else, either by choice or not. Yes, it's definitely possible to even turn down all external/third-party/contributed/proposed patches, in effect maintaining full "ownership" (perhaps in the copyleft sense) over the pertinent lines of code.
It has often been said, and moreover articulated accurately, that software projects that refuse to collaborate (actively hostile towards outside contributions or contributions from the outside) are to be avoided. There's a real risk that malicious things - by virtue of a dictator's temptation - will get integrated, without any forks emerging as a response too these malicious things. Correctly, in my personal opinion, one can classify WordPress as an example of this. Some recent press reports that I cannot challenge for accuracy suggest that Automattic is tightening its grip over the project. I still remember how, around 2005, we (the community, before Automattic existed) were picking up bug reports, e.g. about issues with language support in east Asia. The fixes were trivial, but that work still needed to be done and collaboration helped 'weed out' the bugs or the creases in early versions of WordPress.
Collaboration inside WordPress has long been an issue. For instance, one cofounder locked the other cofounder out of commit-level access to make way for his own buddy from Cisco, who was writing the lion's share of code. The cofounder who did this wasn't even a programmer by trade and he was still a teenager. Things got a bit sour after this and I personally intervened when I witnessed this. It's in the mailing lists' archives.
Now, to be clear, Automattic - if not WordPress itself - is under attack from a Microsoft-connected VC (the cofounder of WordPress is correct about it; we wrote about Silver Lake many times before). However, the reaction to that attack seems counterproductive. It alienates so many; it's an own goal.
Yesterday we wrote two articles [1, 2] explaining why it's probably time to leave WordPress and use an SSG (static site generator) instead. Wikipedia, which we do not endorse by the way, has this list of of SSGs:
| System label/name | Language | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Jekyll | Ruby | Uses Liquid templating language. |
| Hugo | Go | Uses Go templates and its main selling point is its high speed when compiling. |
| Next.js | JavaScript | Uses React templates. |
| Pelican | Python | Uses Jinja2 templates. Compiles HTML from reStructuredText or Markdown. |
| Astro | JavaScript | Uses the .astro syntax language by default (familiar to HTML or JSX). Supports multiple frameworks: Svelte, React, Preact, Vue, SolidJS, Lit, AlpineJS. Compiles HTML from Markdown or MDX. |
| Docusaurus | JavaScript | Compiles HTML from MDX, Markdown, JavaScript and React. Uses Node.js. Customization with React. |
| Eleventy | JavaScript | Supports 10 template languages. |
There are many more.
Ours is AGPLv3-licensed and written mostly in Perl (developed by us since 2022). However, it's not very simple to install at this point in time. That's work in progress. We make improvements every week. █