After looking at their repos, especially [1], I think it'd probably have been better if they made a soft-fork of Wordpress with its own infrastructure instead of the current setup where they try to hijack core wordpress with alternative implementations. This approach is doomed to fail, as the core Wordpress developers would be forced by executive directives to break said mechanisms.
Also, the jkpress post by Matt Mullenwegg linked in TFA has to be one of the most unprofessional and caustic things I've ever seen someone write, and reflects poorly on his character.
Seems smart to start by contributing a more openly governed path. If Matt starts to fight, sabotage and shut that down it gives the important yeah-we-did-try style cover to the reasonable next step of forking.
By being unreasonably reasonable in this way I would expect they bring the most members of the community with them if a fork has to happen.
They also leave a door open for Matt to leave this effort alone or even welcome it. A potential road to recovering trust over time.
> the jkpress post by Matt Mullenwegg linked in TFA has to be one of the most unprofessional and caustic things I've ever seen someone write, and reflects poorly on his character.
Evidently you haven't been paying much attention to Matt or WordPress. Matt Mullenweg is - and seemingly always has been - simply a caustic, manipulative, dishonest, petty, etc... person. He was generally good at hiding it, but it always peeked through on an annual basis. But it's simply been the norm for the past 9 months - sometimes on a daily basis.
I don't think it's likely that core will actively break these things. If they removed the ability to filter HTTP requests, they'd break a lot of plugins and likely a lot of sites, which would become a nightmare, because their main selling point is "one click install, never worry about it again" -- they primarily compete with Wix, Jimdo etc, not with other CMS.
If they changed their backend to disallow this implementation from accessing it, they'd also break it for older versions of WP (which feels like the majority) and cut off the upgrade-path for those sites.
WP's heavy use of filters & actions are what makes it bearable to work with for developers, and without the plugin ecosystem, Wordpress would be no serious competitor to anything.
I don't know if this will work out, the code looks worrying - they support all the way down to php 7.2, but OOP and composer don't require php8. On the other hand, so do most WP plugins, and core does too.
The contributors who worked on this project (including myself - I'm one of the TSC co-chairs) are very familiar with the internals of WordPress - we were the ones who wrote them :)
Blocking the way that FAIR works would break the way that premium plugins work, which would break a huge amount of the ecosystem, so we think it's unlikely - WordPress core would need to be patched.
I suspect, without knowing anything, that WPEngine's lawsuit will put wordpress in a position where they can't do anything to suppress alternative implementations of their infrastructure.
I'm suspicious of the Linux Foundation, and am pretty much on the side of wordpress in the big dispute, but I'd switch to a distributed solution in a second if it worked 75% as well. The difference in management risk between a) dealing with a single CEO of a single organization who behaves that way in public, and b) a distributed Linux Foundation sponsored apt-style plugin repository, is huge.
If a lot of people are like me, that means wordpress is doomed. People don't want to fork because they don't want to pay for wordpress development. Taking away revenue from wordpress is going to stagnate it (even more, and it's a dinosaur anyway.) The parasites will have killed the host.
> am pretty much on the side of wordpress in the big dispute
This essentially discredits you completely... A judge already granted an injunction against Matt to revert all his nonsense, which only really happens when the case is overwhelmingly strong against them.
> The parasites will have killed the host.
The problem is that the "host" IS the parasite in this case.
> People don't want to fork because they don't want to pay for wordpress development.
People don't fork because they wouldn't stay compatible with core, and thus not keep compatibility with most of the plugins if they do anything meaningful to improve the code (and if you don't, why would you fork?)
core and plugins are handcuffed together: plugins are nothing without core, but core is just a horrible mess of spaghetti code with no value without plugins. yet core can't really be improved without abandoning a bunch of plugins (on which they depend for being viable as a CMS).
So far, core seems to err on the side of plugin authors (unless they're deemed competitors to .com), i.e. rug-pulls and replacing the plugin with malware-adjacent "new functionality" is totally fine for .org's plugin masters.
Also, the jkpress post by Matt Mullenwegg linked in TFA has to be one of the most unprofessional and caustic things I've ever seen someone write, and reflects poorly on his character.
[1] https://github.com/fairpm/fair-plugin