It’s a new year, but drama in the WordPress community keeps going. Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, said that it would reduce its contribution to WordPress core, the open-source project that acts as the backbone of most of Automattic’s products and ensures the longevity of WordPress as a technology and community.
Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has been in a kerfuffle with WP Engine since September last year over the very issue of contribution to WordPress as an open-source and community project.
iIn a blog post, the company said that it would reduce the number of hours it commits to the Five For the Future program to match rival hosting provider WP Engine’s contribution in terms of the number of weekly hours.
“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,” Automattic said in the latest blog post.
The company added that it will redirect the resources to the ongoing legal battle against WP Engine.
At an event last year, Mullenweg called WP Engine “cancer to WordPress,” pointing out a large stake owned by private equity firm Silver Lake in the company and a lack of contribution from the hosting provider to support sustainable growth. In the new blog post, Automattic called out this fact again.
“WP Engine’s historically slim contributions underscore the imbalance that must be addressed for the health of WordPress. We believe in fairness and shared responsibility, and we hope this move encourages greater participation across all organizations that benefit from WordPress,” Automattic said.
Automattic contributes around 2,560 hours per week, as per Five for The Future’s dashboard. This number is already significantly less than the 3,900 hours per week the company contributed in September. It’s not clear if this reduction is because of the company’s shrinking headcount or a general strategy shift.
The company’s new blog post also sarcastically noted that members of the “community” have considered working on commercial products like WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce as contributing to WordPress. So engineers will focus on building those products instead of contributing to WordPress core. Automattic is also under pressure to perform better on a financial point of view. In December, BlackRock marked down its investment in Automattic by 10% — and this wasn’t the first markdown. Overall, the investment firm has devalued its investment by more than 50%.
The new directive related to contributions to the community project wasn’t the only decision related to WordPress.org. Earlier this week, Thijs Buijs, a WordPress core contributor and the person who led the sustainability team, decided to step down as a representative. The sustainability team focused on the longevity of WordPress through social, economic, and environmental aspects.
According to a Slack screenshot posted on Reddit, Buijs disagreed with Mullenweg’s approach to advancing WordPress. In response, Mullenweg disbanded the sustainability Slack channel while saying, “Today, I learned we have a sustainability team.” Notably, Mullenweg initiated this channel’s idea during an event in 2022.
Mullenweg’s approach to the legal battle with WP Engine has attracted calls for a different kind of leadership in the WordPress world. Last month, Joost de Valk, the creator of Yoast, a popular WordPress SEO tool, outlined a plan to make a “federated” approach to the WordPress repository for decentralized access to assets like plug-ins and themes.
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