It’s a new year, but the drama in the WordPress community continues. Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, said it would reduce its contribution to the 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 at loggerheads with WP Engine since September of last year over the issue of contributing to WordPress as an open source and community project.
In a blog post, the company said it would reduce the number of hours it commits to the Five For the Future program to match the contribution of rival hosting provider WP Engine in terms of weekly hours.
“As part of this reset, Automattic will match its voluntary pledge with those made by WP Engine and other players in the ecosystem, or approximately 45 hours per week that qualify under the Five For the Future program as a benefit to the entire community and not just one company. These hours will likely go towards security and critical updates,” Automattic said in a recent blog post.
The company added that it will redirect resources to the ongoing legal battle against WP Engine.
At an event last year, Mullenweg called WP Engine the “cancer on WordPress,” noting a large stake owned by private equity firm Silver Lake in the company and the hosting provider’s lack of input to support growth. stable. In the new blog post, Automattic emphasized this fact again.
“WP Engine’s historically low contributions highlight 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,” said Automattic.
Automattic contributes about 2,560 hours per week, according to the Five for The Future dashboard. That number is already significantly less than the 3,900 hours per week the company contributed in September. It is not clear whether this reduction is due to a reduction in the company’s headcount or a change in overall strategy.
The company’s new blog post also noted sarcastically that members of the “community” have considered work on commercial products like WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce to be contributors to WordPress. So engineers will focus on building those products instead of contributing to the core of WordPress. Automattic is also under pressure to perform better financially. In December, BlackRock cut its investment in Automattic by 10% — and it wasn’t the first cut. Overall, the investment firm has devalued its investment by more than 50%.
The new directive regarding contributions to the community project was not the only decision related to WordPress.org. Earlier this week, Thijs Buijs, a key WordPress 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 picture of Slack posted on Reddit, Buijs disagreed with Mullenweg’s approach to advancing WordPress. In response, Mullenweg took to the sustainability Slack channel saying, “Today, I learned we have a sustainability team.” Notably, Mullenweg initiated the idea of this channel during an event in 2022.
Mullenweg’s approach to the legal battle with WP Engine has drawn 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 take a “federated” approach to the WordPress repository for decentralized access to assets like plugins and themes.
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