WordPress Openness (was Re: [wp-hackers] UI development for 1.6)

[Matthew Mullenweg]

Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> It often seems as if WP is an impenetrable development community. Many
> suggestions (including several of mine, which were definitely 
> constructive) are
> ignored and additional code is labeled "plug-in" and added to a 
> 'graveyard'. The
> community makes some independent decisions (without polls) and while it's
> XFN-friendly, it is not very professionally friendly (read: open). In the
> spirit of the GPL, what was open must remain open. Until some months 
> ago, b2
> was not even acknowledged properly.

By necessity not everything can go into the core. The whole point of the 
plugin system is to allow people to extend WP without including code in 
the core and bloating the codebase with things that may only appeal to a 
limited subset of people. Every highly mature OS project I'm familiar 
with has evolved in a similar way, and the ones that haven't are IMO 
either bloated or a pain to upgrade.

I have no idea what you mean by the b2 remark, it has been in the first 
paragraph of the about page for over two years now and I always talk 
about b2 when people ask about the origins of WP.

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
  http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
http://pingomatic.com | http://cnet.com