The WordPress mess
Plus, Chromium charges on; momentum in the fediverse; and Dolby Atmos has a new open source rival.
So here we are, the inaugural issue of Forkable — it’s a bumper first edition, with news spanning the first few weeks of 2025. If you missed the welcome post, you can read that again here.
This week, we look at the ongoing WordPress / Automattic / WP Engine saga; a new “neutral space” for Chromium; the momentum behind the AT Protocol and ActivityPub; and more.
Paul
Open issue
The WordPress mess
The WordPress vs WP Engine brouhaha isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
WordPress.com parent Automattic announced plans to reduce its contributions to the core WordPress open source project, and align itself with the efforts of WP Engine — a rival WordPress hosting company that Automattic CEO (and WordPress co-creator) Matt Mullenweg has accused of not contributing nearly enough to the open source project.
Automattic wrote:
Automattic has always been deeply committed to the success of WordPress, dedicating significant resources and talent to its development for almost two decades. However, we’ve observed an imbalance in how contributions to WordPress are distributed across the ecosystem, and it’s time to address this.
Automattic’s remaining contributions will apparently focus on “security and critical updates,” with company personnel redeployed from the core project to for-profit initiatives within Automattic — such as WordPress.com, Jetpack, and WooCommerce.
Shortly after, Mullenweg announced that he would deactivate several WordPress.org accounts, including two people he said were planning a WordPress fork. However, Joost de Valk — creator of WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast; and Karim Marucchi, CEO of enterprise web consulting firm Crowd Favorite, denied any such plans. Not that this should be a reason for being deactivated anyway (and at the time of writing, neither of these two accounts has actually been deactivated as far as we can tell).
However, this shows that the WordPress vs. WP Engine saga isn’t just a battle between two organizations — it’s very much a battle from within, and across, the entire WordPress community.
The rundown
A ‘neutral space’ for Chromium
While Chromium underpins Google’s own Chrome browser, its open source foundations has spurred uptake in myriad other browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Meta’s VR-focused Quest Browser.
As such, the Linux Foundation launched a new initiative designed as a “neutral space” for everyone involved in Chromium. Google, Microsoft, Opera, and Meta are all inaugural backers of Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers, a project that will gather corporations, academia, and developers to support and fund “open development and enhance projects within the Chromium ecosystem.”
The sky is blue…
There’s more than a little momentum in the fediverse (or, the “open social web”). Last month, a dedicated seed fund launched for fledgling projects built on the AT Protocol — an open source, open standards-based framework for decentralized social networking (which Bluesky is built on).
Fast forward to January, and news emerged of an upcoming photo-sharing app for Bluesky called Flashes, which is currently being tested ahead of a formal launch. Mark Cuban, meanwhile, said he was ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on the AT Protocol, though that was before TikTok’s last-minute reprieve.
But it’s not all about the AT Protocol. Pixelfed, developer of a decentralized Instagram alternative, kicked off a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to build open source alternatives to the likes of TikTok and WhatsApp on top of the ActivityPub protocol. At the time of writing, Pixelfed has raised £48,000 ($60,000) of its £28,000 ($35,000) goal.
Elsewhere, open source forum software maker NodeBB also joined ActivityPub this week.
We’re only three weeks into the new year, but 2025 is shaping up to be a big year for the fediverse.
Spatial expression
Co-developed by Google and Samsung Research, Eclipsa Audio has Dolby Atmos firmly in its crosshairs, debuting this month as an open source, royalty-free spatial audio format that promises to “democratize” immersive 3D audio.
Samsung is bringing Eclipsa to its own range of TVs and soundbars in 2025, while Google said it plans to support Eclipsa natively in YouTube, Chrome, and the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
Getting contributors paid
Merit.Systems is a new blockchain-based startup that touts an economic model dubbed “open source capitalism.” In short, it wants to fix the age-old problem of getting contributors paid, by adding “rich attribution information to software version control systems like GitHub.”
Alongside its launch this month, the company announced it had raised $10 million from Andreessen Horowitz’ crypto fund (a16z crypto), Blockchain Capital, among several angel backers.
Patch notes
Looking for an open source URL shortener and link-tracking service? Check out Dub.co, which just raised $2 million to grow its SaaS service.
Powered by the Raspberry Pi 5, Pilet is a “retro-futuristic” open source mini computer. It reached its Kickstarter funding goal of £11,000 ($13,500) in 5 minutes, and has now received well over £500,000 ($615,000) in pledges at the time of writing.
After Nvidia completed its acquisition of Run.ai, the AI infrastructure startup said it would open source its software, which is currently restricted to Nvidia products.
First announced in November, RedHat this month closed its acquisition of AI optimization startup Neural Magic.
Microsoft open-sourced its new generative AI model called Phi4 on Hugging Face, following its launch last month.
The Public Domain Image Archive is a new collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright images, from the good folks at the Public Domain Review.