It’s a new year, but the drama in the WordPress community continues. Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, said it will reduce its contributions to WordPress core, the open source project that underpins 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 last September over the issue of contributions to WordPress as an open-source and community project. In a blog post, the company said it will reduce the number of hours it spends on its Five For The Future program to match the contribution of rival hosting provider WP Engine in terms of hours per week. “As part of this reset, Automattic will match voluntary pledges with those made by WP Engine and other players in the ecosystem, or about 45 hours a week who qualify in the Five For The Future program as a benefit to the entire community and not just a single company .The hours are approaching security and critical updates,” Automattic said in its latest blog post. The company added that it will direct its resources to the ongoing legal battle against WP Engine. At last year’s event, Mullenweg called WP Engine “cancer for WordPress,” referring to the large stake owned by private equity firm Silver Lake in the company and the lack of contributions from hosting providers to support sustainable growth. In a recent blog post, Automattic mentioned this fact again. “WP Engine’s historically thin contribution underscores the imbalance that needs to be addressed for the health of WordPress. We believe in fairness and shared responsibility, and we hope this move encourages greater participation in all organizations that benefit from WordPress,” Automattic said. Automattic contributes about 2,560 hours per week, according to the Five for The Future dashboard. This number is already less than the 3,900 hours per week that the company contributed in September. It is unclear whether this reduction is due to a shrinking number of companies or a general change in strategy. The company’s recent blog post also noted sarcastically that “community” members consider working on commercial products like WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce to be contributions to WordPress. So engineers will focus on building the product instead of contributing to the WordPress core. Automattic is also under pressure to do better from a financial standpoint. In December, BlackRock marked up its investment in Automattic by 10% — and it wasn’t the first markup. Overall, investment companies have reduced their investments by more than 50%. The new directive related to contributions to community projects is not the only decision related to WordPress.org. Earlier this week, Thijs Buijs, a WordPress core contributor and the person leading the sustainability team, decided to step down as a representative. The sustainability team focuses on the longevity of WordPress through social, economic, and environmental aspects. According to a screenshot of Slack posted on Reddit, Buijs disagrees with Mullenweg’s approach to moving WordPress forward. In response, Mullenweg shut down the sustainability Slack channel when he said, “Today, I realized that we have a sustainability team.” In particular, Mullenweg started the idea of this channel during an event in 2022. Mullenweg’s approach to the legal battle with WP Engine has attracted calls for various leadership in the world of WordPress. Last month, Joost de Valk, creator of Yoast, a popular WordPress SEO tool, outlined plans to create a “federated” approach to WordPress repositories for decentralized access to assets like plugins and themes. You can contact this reporter at im@ivanmehta.com or at Signal: @ivan.42
Automattic says it will reduce its contribution to the WordPress core project to match WP Engine
