[Rae Morey at The Repository]

The bananas activity continues over at Automattic / Matt Mullenweg's house:

"Members of the fledgling WordPress Sustainability Team have been left reeling after WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg abruptly dissolved the team this week.

[...] The disbandment happened after team rep Thijs Buijs announced in Making WordPress Slack on Wednesday that he was stepping down from his role, citing a Reddit thread Mullenweg created on Christmas Eve asking for suggestions to create WordPress drama in 2025."

Meanwhile, a day earlier, Automattic announced that it will ramp down its own contributions to WordPress:

"To recalibrate and ensure our efforts are as impactful as possible, Automattic will reduce its sponsored contributions to the WordPress project. This is not a step we take lightly. It is a moment to regroup, rethink, and strategically plan how Automatticians can continue contributing in ways that secure the future of WordPress for generations to come. Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress."

This is a genuinely odd thing to do. Yes, it's true that Automattic is at a disadvantage in the sense that it contributes far more to the open source project than other private companies. Free riders have long been a problem for open source innovators. But it's also why the company exists. I have questions about the balance of open source vs proprietary code in Automattic's future offerings. That's important because WordPress is the core value of its products and the open source core guarantees freedom from lock-in.

Is there a proprietary CMS coming down the wire? Is this bizarre board activity behind the scenes? Is something else going on? This whole situation still feels to me like there's another shoe ready to drop - and the longer it goes on, the bigger that shoe seems to be. I hope they don't completely squander the trust and value they've been building for decades.

#Technology

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