I'll start out by saying that reporting on WordPress / Automattic / Matt Mullenweg these past few months has brought me no joy. WordPress has had a huge impact on my professional career during the past two decades, and I'm grateful for it and the community that built it. However like any relationship — there's either a reason or a season — and I'm ready to move on from it if need be.
When WooCommerce approached me last year about becoming one of our News Partners, I was ecstatic. When they decided not to move forward, I was disappointed. When all this WordPress drama began, I was relieved.
More than anything, I'm baffled why all this drama is happening. Can't Matt Mullenweg see that this is not the way to lead? Or do we get so caught down the rabbit hole of our own actions that it becomes impossible to back out?
Either way, here goes yet another update on the WordPress Drama:
Matt Mullenweg Automattic announced that it would be decreasing its contributions to WordPress, the open-source project, to instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce.
The company wrote:
“We’ve observed an imbalance in how contributions to WordPress are distributed across the ecosystem, and it’s time to address this. Additionally, we’re having to spend significant time and money to defend ourselves against the legal attacks started by WP Engine and funded by Silver Lake, a large private equity firm.”
“As part of this reset, Automattic will match its volunteering pledge with those made by WP Engine and other players in the ecosystem, or about 45 hours a week that qualify under the Five For the Future program as benefitting the entire community and not just a single company. These hours will likely go towards security and critical updates. Members of the ‘community' have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress.”
Was that last part a stab at me? I've said that…
Dr. Christopher Kunz of Heise Online put that reduction into context:
“Automattic currently donates 1430 hours per week, which means it intends to invest 97 percent less development time in the future. As the corresponding profile page on ‘Five for the Future' explains, these hours are split between almost one hundred employees in 17 teams across the WordPress ecosystem.”
Do I think Automattic's decision is fair?
Sure, why not? At this point, I'm losing capacity to care. And like many other professionals in the space, I'm losing confidence in the future reliability of WordPress as a CMS and debating whether to continue developing on it for new projects moving forward.
Many experts have argued that WordPress Core (the built-in features available in WordPress without plugins) has gotten too bloated, and that building Guttenberg directly benefited Automattic / WordPress.com anyway — so perhaps it's not a bad thing if WordPress open-source contributors only focused on security and critical updates, leaving advanced functionality development to plugin makers.
Others have speculated that this is the beginning of Automattic leaving WordPress.org (the open-source project) in the dust in retaliation, and developing all future WordPress features as for-profit under its WordPress.com arm.
Regardless, the whole move by Automattic feels like the company is extorting the community to get what it wants and taunting WP Engine to stop the fight that Mullenweg started. But like I said, I'm losing energy to care.
In other WordPress Drama news…
- Mullenweg deactivated the accounts of several prominent WordPress.org community members including Joost de Valk (creator of Yoast SEO plugin) and Karim Marucchi (CEO of Crowd Favorite) for sharing their visions for a new WordPress era in separate blog posts. Mullenweg referred to their plans as a “fork,” even though neither made mention of doing so in their posts.
- Mullenweg also deactivated the accounts of Sé Reed (CEO of a non-profit called WP Community Collective), Heather Burns (a former contribute to the WordPress who hasn't been involved in the project since 2020), and Morten Rand-Hendriksen (who also left the project several years ago, but has since talked about the need for proper governance, accountability, and conflict of interest policies).
- Mullenweg disbanded WordPress' sustainability team after Thijs Buijs announced that he was stepping down as Team Representative. Mullenweg replied to the announcement, “Today I learned that we have a sustainability team” and then talked about how they should have a different approach anyway. This guy can't lose…