Matt Mullenweg thinks WordPress is in decline. He may be right
When open source becomes a bureaucracy, it stops being able to innovate. For a product, that can mean death.
I’m going to put my neck on the line on this story about Matt Mullenweg’s criticism of Wordpress’s open source release culture:
“WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg has delivered a wide-ranging critique of the WordPress project, saying it has spent years doing damage to itself and calling out a release culture he says produces ‘boring or mediocre crap.’”
It goes on to describe Mullenweg’s frustrations with an open source culture that prevents anything being released without a wide-ranging discussion that brings dozens of people into the thread.
“We are not being killed by competition, I believe we have done this to ourselves. We did it by blindly following rules and ideals to a point when they became iatrogenic. […] By definition the things that will give us the biggest wins will be the most non-consensus, so we have to accept the occasional failure or mistake otherwise we will never have any wins.”
So here’s my controversial statement in 2026: on these points, Matt Mullenweg is completely right.
This bureaucratic, consensus-driven culture has also been a blight on other large open source projects, for example at Mozilla. Contributions should be made quickly, and product design should be opinionated rather than consensus-driven. The more a project seeks consensus, the less able it is to innovate.
That doesn’t mean it should be a fiefdom or a dictatorship. Governance structures have been well-established by co-operatives and similar organizations that allow people to be elected into key roles; if they underperform, the voting base can support someone else. But it’s far better to put your trust in an architect — and achieve consensus about that trust — than it is to try and reach broad consensus about every change. Otherwise it’s not just that nobody wants to try bold new ideas; they literally can’t.
This is distinct from web standards, for example, which need a consensus basis to prevent a single vendor from dominating how interoperability works. For example, Mozilla’s objection to the web Prompt API that Google proposed is good; that’s how those systems should work. But for an individual software project, moving quickly and genuinely innovating are vital.
Dave Winer has another take: that WordPress should be more of a platform and allow different people to build opinionated interfaces on top of it. I think that makes a ton of sense too; in that world, WordPress can be an ecosystem monolith, and the opinionated innovation is left to smaller entrepreneurs. That, to be honest, might work a lot better.
