Mozilla. WordPress. Now Manjaro. Open Source Keeps Dying the Same Way.

He fired the only person watching the money. Made himself treasurer. 2 years later, his own 50/50 business partner signed a public manifesto against him.

Three projects. Three communities. One pattern.

Mozilla's CEO collected $7 million while Firefox dropped from 30% to 3% market share. WordPress's founder told The Verge that WordPress.org "just belongs to me personally."

Both had the same structural problem: one person controlled the infrastructure, the money, and the governance. The community did the labor. One person held every key.

Now it is happening again.

On March 9, 2026, 21 team members of Manjaro Linux published a document titled "Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto." They included the company's own CTO, Roman Gilg, who co-owns 50% of Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG. The manifesto's core accusation: "The Manjaro name is only used for its popularity, and the community is only used as guinea pigs and as unpaid workers."

Philip Müller, Manjaro's co-founder and last remaining original developer, holds four roles simultaneously: CEO, project lead, community treasurer (after firing the previous one), and sole administrator of every piece of infrastructure. The domain. The GitHub organizations. The forum. The servers. The trademark. One person, zero oversight.

Manjaro's version is worse than Mozilla or WordPress. The person who controls everything? His own business partner, the CTO who co-owns half the company, just publicly turned against him.

And his response was to compare it to the Mutiny on the Bounty.