How to Scare your Contributors Away: A Veteran’s View on the Platform’s Turmoil

If you’re a tech enthusiast or an open-source advocate, you’ve likely encountered the term #wpdrama. But what exactly is it, and why has it caused such a stir in the WordPress community?

In short, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, criticized companies like WP Engine for benefiting from open-source software without contributing back.

It’s not the first time a company has been accused of exploiting open-source contributions, but the way Matt addressed it sparked significant controversy. Open-source contributors face these issues day in and day out. Articles have already been written on this topic (to name a few).

What is dramatic is the way this was addressed. The argument was framed as he went against one specific company, and his actions called all the good things he has been doing for the WordPress community into question.

In the end, as the song says, It’s all about the money.

The Contributor Effect

At the beginning of this #wpdrama, I was just reading the news, checking the Twitter threads (yes, I’m still calling it Twitter), and watching it all unfold in real-time. It was scary to see one man going against every sound advice people were giving him. This resonated deeply with me because I, too, am a long-term contributor to WordPress.

Even though I’m not as active in the WordPress community as I was a few years ago, I still hold the community in my heart. It is what drew me in. WordPress was my ‘gateway drug’ to programming.

I started working with WordPress in 2014 at my first job. Soon enough, I realized that the software is more than it seems. I found out there are thousands of people writing the code and trying to make it better. Not only that but there are people organizing meetups and conferences, bringing people together who feel passionately about the project. A lot of popular open-source software have similar communities, but I don’t think that any has the scale of the WordPress community.

And it is that community that makes you go back to contributing. There is a sense of accomplishment when you see your name in the credits of a major release. I went from reviewing WordPress themes to being a representative of the themes team to a member of the WordPress Coding Standards group. I’ve organized local meetups after a long time of hiatus. During my time as a contributor, I met dozens of amazing people from all over the world and I call them friends now.

Seeing all this happening was a bit disheartening, partly because it confirmed why I slowly stopped actively contributing.

The price of the contribution

In 2019, I met Matt at WordCamp Berlin to discuss issues related to theme reviews and their role in the community. The meeting left me feeling like I was talking to a politician – vague answers and no concrete solutions.

In a sense, Matt is like a politician—never giving straight answers. And I can understand him. He cannot promise to solve everybody’s problems with WordPress.

Not because he cannot or doesn’t want to. The reason is quite simple—besides being a co-founder of WordPress software, he is the founder of Automattic, a parent company of WordPress.com, a hosting platform for blogs and websites powered by WordPress software (I can feel the confusion setting in). As a CEO, his mission is to have a profitable company. 

This was the gripe most people had when wanting to contribute to WordPress. It’s no secret that the direction WordPress software makes is the direction that is most beneficial to Automattic.

The introduction of the Gutenberg editor was seen as a response to competitors like Wix and Squarespace, which had already simplified page building for users. Despite its potential, Gutenberg received the most 1-star reviews on wordpress.org, highlighting the community’s dissatisfaction.

The alienation of contributors started a long time ago and culminated with the latest drama.

Giving your time and money with nothing in return is demotivating. This is what made me slowly stop making contributions.

The drama unveiled

At his State of the Word address at WordCamp US in Portland, Oregon, Matt Mullenweg decided to ‘go nuclear’ (his own words). He attacked all the companies taking advantage of WordPress software without contributing back, specifying WP Engine as the big bad guy funded by private equity firms. He went so far as calling them a ‘cancer to WordPress’.

You could say the pot is calling the kettle black, as several private equity firms fund his own company, Automattic.

We can agree that his company spends much more money on contributions than any other. Then again, they do have the most to gain or lose by supporting it.

However, the point of contributing is that it’s not all about how much money you bring to the table. WP Engine contributed by sponsoring numerous events and paying its developers to maintain free and paid versions of very popular plugins such as Advanced Custom Fields. We could play tit for tat on this one and end up being none the wiser. Ultimately, what about thousands of contributors who took their time and contributed but got nothing in return?

In the aftermath of his speech, it became public that he contacted them before the speech and requested that they give 8% of their revenue to Automattic due to a ‘trademark violation.’ His issue wasn’t just about contributing.

On open-source as a public good, licensing missteps, and community building

Aftermath

Soon enough, cease-and-desist letters started flowing, followed by Matt banning all members of the WP Engine engineering teams that maintained their plugins. This resulted in lawsuits and a hostile takeover of one of the most popular WordPress plugins, Advanced Custom Fields, under the guise of security.

It was an unprecedented move that proved that Matt has ultimate control over wordpress.org. In an interview with The Verge, he said that he owns wordpress.org (the site that hosts all the WordPress themes, plugins, and related services that power the WordPress community).

This one revelation, coupled with his responses on social networks, caused quite a stir among long-time contributors and enterprises that used WordPress as the basis for their web presence.

To be honest, it’s hard to say which part of this #wpdrama is worst. This could impact regular users, enterprise owners, or contributors.

In my opinion, one of the worst things that happened was the exodus of core committers—trusted and regular WordPress committers to the core software. Many prominent WordPress users stopped their contributions until this mess was resolved. 

The effects of this can be detrimental to the overall stability of the software. When you lose quality contributors to your software, you risk adding code that will do more harm than good. When you lose people who have worked on it for years and know its ins and outs, more and more subtle bugs creep in.

The #wpdrama saga underscores the tension between commercial interests and community contributions in open-source projects. As WordPress navigates these challenges, the community’s response will be crucial in shaping its future.

The way forward

We don’t know how these lawsuits will end. This is the first time we are seeing two massive players with lawyers who charge serious amounts of money engage in legal battles. 

This creates uncertainty for end users and, for regular contributors, fear of losing jobs and means of survival.

One thing is clear: the benevolent dictator-for-life model isn’t working. In an open-source community with such an impact on the web, we must have clear governance in place—a board consisting of trusted community members pushing the agenda that will benefit the contributors and the end users, not corporate interests.

The governance idea isn’t new. An initiative called wpgovernance.com aimed to implement guardrails against precisely what happened.

It may sound ungrateful toward Mullenweg, seeing as he was the person spending his company’s money to run WordPress.org. But with such a big impact, something like a PHP foundation could have been set up for WordPress instead. The infrastructure wouldn’t be dependent on one person but on the goodwill of the individual contributors and companies profiting the most from the project.

WordPress will have a great future only if we figure out how to change this at a structural level and take back the community.

Only time will tell.