As you may have seen elsewhere, I’m joining AspirePress as a security advisor and project contributor.

As I write this, tensions are running high in the WordPress community after Matt Mullenweg hijacked ACF.

The fallout for Automattic’s behavior is felt by the rest of the community: anxiety, cancelled contracts with prospective clients, and an unclear vision for the long-term future of the WordPress open source project. There has been serious discussion about forking WordPress (a topic that I wouldn’t have imagined being discussed seriously as recent as two months ago!) to claw it out of Automattic’s death grip.

After I published my previous posts about this topic (highlighting the work I did since 2015 to improve the security of PHP and WordPress), the AspirePress team reached out to me and shared their vision for the future of WordPress.

Most critical to the WordPress community: The goals of AspirePress can be achieved without a hard-fork or fracturing the community.

If the AspirePress project is successful, one man’s ego will no longer be an existential threat to the future of an estimated 43% of websites on the Internet, or to the livelihoods of the people that rely on them.

I bring to the table years of experience with open source software development, application security, and applied cryptography. I’m committed to ensuring that the decentralization of the WordPress package ecosystem improves the security and trustworthiness of WordPress without unnecessary cognitive load on people who don’t care about security nerd stuff.

A better future is possible, and we will build it together.

https://scottarc.blog/2024/10/24/aspirepress-is-what-the-wordpress-community-needs-today/

#AspirePress #openSourceSoftware #WordPress