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Last year was absolutely wild. For those who didn't follow all the threads, tweets, and secret Slack channels in real time, this blog offers an excellent recap—complete with popcorn-worthy drama.
Then suddenly... silence. No new statements, no live rants—just radio silence. Probably because Matt Mullenweg's company Automattic and their biggest competitor WP Engine are currently dragging each other to court, and everyone involved would rather keep quiet until the trial date.
But while the popcorn was being put away outside, things were just heating up behind the scenes. The wave spilled over from the WordPress corner into the entire open-source ecosystem—and suddenly, the sales drones of closed-source vendors had a new favorite talking point:
"Sure, back in the day, the argument 'Open source is insecure because the code is visible' was popular, but hardly anyone buys that anymore. So now we're pushing the narrative 'Open source is dangerous because some unhinged dictator could ruin your entire business tomorrow.' Just look at what's happening with WordPress right now!"
Whether they couldn't be bothered to check if the WordPress scenario actually applies to every other FLOSS community or if it just conveniently fit their agenda to generalize, who knows. As long as the glossy slides were printed and the WP drama stood as a big boogeyman on slide 7.
And the WordPress community itself? Remarkably quiet. The big players don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them—understandable, but also a little disappointing.
So the pushback had to come from outside—from friends in the FLOSS ecosystem.
Maintainer? None other than the Linux Foundation. Someone actually built a new project out of the shitstorm—respect!
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Linux Foundation announces FAIR Package Manager project for Open Source Content Management System stability
FAIR is a plugin that can be downloaded like any other from the WordPress directory and activated in your WordPress instance.
What does it do? It connects the WordPress installation to decentralized repositories. Instead of only checking wordpress.org for core, theme, and plugin updates, it now queries multiple trusted sources simultaneously.
Everything that WordPress normally pulls from its central server is now fetched by FAIR from across the network.
For users, nothing changes in daily operation: The dashboard looks the same, plugins continue functioning and update automatically. Only the underlying technology is now distributed – no single point of failure, no central control point directing everything.
This solves one of the most pressing issues that caused major disruptions last year. A single individual was able to control and restrict access to software updates.
As a side benefit, it provides significant momentum toward breaking dependencies on centralized update servers – potentially inspiring other open-source projects with similar infrastructure setups.
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