One of the unfortunate realities of the current situation with WordPress is that the problems surfaced are hardly limited to Matt Mullenweg. Long ago, the people controlling areas of WordPress that we had the most interaction were often people that were similar to Matt Mullenweg in many ways. The security issues with WordPress plugins today largely exist because of the people who have run the plugin directory, the WordPress Plugin Review Team. They have long been actively hostile to working with other to address problems, when not actually creating the problems. Like Matt Mullenweg, members of the team have portrayed themselves as victims in situations where they were definitely not victims. That made a recent set of events unsurprising to us.
A week ago, the Repository allowed a member of the team to anonymously complain about the forking of the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) Pro plugin and claim that their team had no responsibility for it: [Read more]