By Brent Toderash
Published Post Date
≅4,611 Words on Post Terms

Looking for the TL;DR? Just skip to the “And Here We Are” Part.

Note: Things move too fast for long-form writers — as I was proofreading to hit “publish”, Matt posted a swipe at Heather Brunner and WP Engine on Twit-X and linked to an announcement cutting Automattic’s contributions to WordPress. While I don’t refer to that in this article, count it as another “final straw” for someone. This is the “here” we’ve reached: a kind of stalemate over who’s willing to contribute to the future of WordPress.

Context

The most recent watershed moment for WordPress came on December 20th, 2024, when Matt Mullenweg called a “Holiday Break” and shut down most services on the .org site, saying,

I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year. Right now much of the time I would spend making WordPress better is being taken up defending against WP Engine’s legal attacks.

This was quickly reported by Computer World as “WordPress.org statement threatens possible shutdown for all of 2025”, reflecting how community discussion picked up on the indefinite length of the shutdown.¹ After a two-week shutdown, services were restored on January 3, 2025. The shutdown notice itself was like an impromptu edict — unplanned, undefined, poorly executed, and issued spur-of-the-moment, unilaterally. This has increasingly been the nature of Mullenweg’s actions over the past three months, and it’s a danger sign.

Breaking the Status Quo

In rapid response to Matt’s shutdown notice, Joost de Valk posted “Breaking the Status Quo,” causing immediate waves to break throughout the community and in online news sources² A groundswell of support for Joost’s post came in the comments on the post, in Post Status Slack channels, and on X/Twitter by well-known contributors and community members, including Andy Fragen, Courtney Robertson, Tonya Mork, Scott Kingsley Clark, Luc Princen, Colin Stewart, Brian Gardiner, WP Engine, and others.³ Joost’s post called for a change in project leadership:

Our BDFL is no longer Benevolent, and because of that, speaking up in public is a risk. In an interview with Inc (which to be fair Matt called a “hit piece” himself) Matt said he preferred the term “enlightened leader” over “dictator”.

As Joost observed, “it’s fair to say that most in the community would disagree” that Matt displays the qualities of an “enlightened leader”.⁴ Joost doesn’t mince words, saying bluntly, “I think it’s time to let go of the cult and change project leadership.”⁵ He also calls for “Federated and Independent Repositories, in short: FAIR.”⁶

At the same time, Crowd Favorite CEO Karim Marucchi posted his support for Joost’s proposal.⁷ Karim affirms that WordPress is at a crossroads and writes about building upon foundational open-source principles to avoid “what befell other open-source projects that shrank or died while protecting one party’s market position.”⁸ His proposed roadmap spans project direction as well as technical and governance concerns.

Mullenweg Responds (Sort of)

In the comments on Joost’s post, Matt’s responded,

I think this is a great idea for you to lead and do under a name other than WordPress. There’s really no way to accomplish everything you want without starting with a fresh slate from a trademark, branding, and people point of view.

It was predictable, but at least an offer of participation was made. It’s clear Matt is choosing to withhold the support of his team and use of the WordPress mark, effectively saying, “No. Go ahead and fork it.”⁹ On Christmas Eve, he posted on Reddit,

I’m very open to suggestions. Should we stop naming releases after jazz musicians and name them after Drake lyrics? Eliminate all dashboard notices? Take over any plugins into core? Change from blue to purple?

I think we can brainstorm together and come up with way better things than I could on my own. ☺️ Also, Merry Christmas! 🎄

Matt: I’m very open to suggestions.
Narrator: He was not, in fact, open to suggestions.

While obviously intended to be tongue-in-cheek, it provides an indication of how seriously he takes the call for change. It’s likely these examples are characteristic of the extent and tone of the change he would be willing to consider, and once again illustrate how poorly he’s “reading the room.” Responses are pretty much as we’ve come to expect.

WordPress Without Matt?

Hendrik Luehrsen wrote, “The future of WordPress is… something we create together”, but Matt rejects this kind of future. Responding to the flurry of posts on the 20th and affirming Joost’s and Karim’s vision, Hendrik nevertheless wrote in a followup about a symbiotic relationship¹⁰ between Matt/Automattic and the community, where the community drives innovation and growth, and “Automattic’s resources, infrastructure, and stewardship provide[ing] a backbone that cannot easily be replaced.” In his view, the ecosystem depends on both “the leadership and vision provided by Matt and Automattic on one side, and the collective power of the community on the other.” In short, he doesn’t see a bright future for WordPress if it doesn’t include Matt.¹¹

Matt is WordPress

Brian May (Retweeted by Matt)

Brian May recently posted his “strong opinion loosely held”, that “Matt is WordPress“,¹² so he’s opposed to changing the governance structure. Matt seems to also believe that he is WordPress, retweeting Brian’s article and apparently using this concept as part of his legal strategy against the WP Engine suit.¹³ The majority of concerns Brian raises are specifically addressed by a proper governance model, and are better addressed by change than by status quo. I don’t dislike the BDFL model, but when it’s successful, it’s supported by a governance structure that WordPress does not have — and that’s the issue. WordPress may not have a bus factor of 1, but the lack of a governance structure around our current BDFL is an unacceptable risk for the community, both as a whole and in its individual parts. The fact that Matt is portraying himself as WordPress means he cannot and will not submit to any manner of governance reform.

There are times when disruption is both necessary and preferable.

The community is not united on this. Some can’t speak out, others are either content with Matt’s leadership or fear greater turmoil from a change than from the status quo. Perhaps it’s the “devil you know” argument. Up until September 2024, I had remained generally supportive of Matt’s technical direction despite concerns about his tenuous hold on an open source ethic and a number of governance and – let’s euphemistically say “public relations” – matters. My position changed in the weeks that followed WCUS 2024. Yes, it will be disruptive, but there are times when the disruption is both necessary and preferable. I believe the greater majority of the community is ready to and will support a change in governance, even if it requires some radical action. Everyone has their own breaking point, but I’d like to offer what I see as the trajectory that got us here.

Matt’s Ideals Have Gone to Seed

The reasoning behind “Five for the Future” was fundamentally flawed.

The answer to precisely when Matt’s ideals went to seed¹⁷ may vary for different people. For me, it was September of 2014. The impact of the flaw revealed then took ten years and twelve days to detonate. I believe the fact that so many people in the WordPress community learned about FLOSS from Matt meant they couldn’t see the misalignment here,¹⁸ but the reasoning behind “Five for the Future,” was fundamentally flawed, and was a primary indicator that Matt’s ideals had departed (or were never fully aligned with) open source ideals, or “the hacker ethic.”¹⁹ What began at WCUS 2024 is directly linked to its announcement. Contributing is a good goal, and there’s nothing wrong with a challenge, so I applaud those who have participated, but some may have felt the need to do so for the wrong reasons if they didn’t want to be accused of being an existential threat to the project.

We can make some further observations from the points of history I’ve listed.

Matt has had a string of leadership challenges, mostly self-triggered. This is the biggest one to date.

1. Matt’s Leadership. Over the past decade, we’ve also seen dissent mushroom within the WordPress community with challenges to Matt’s leadership,²⁰ I disagreed with Matt’s handling of the dual-licensing debate, especially the fiasco over Thesis (.com).²¹ It turned out that spending $100k on a domain name and banning Envato from WordCamps was just foreshadowing how vindictive Matt can be.²²

2. The Customizer. The UI direction from 4.0 through 4.9 (2014–2017) was the customizer, until Gutenberg was introduced. It’s been an incomplete artifact since then, leaving users hunting through admin settings pages as well as the Customizer to find what they need based on the whim of a developer deciding where to put a given setting.²³ The Customizer is left with all the characteristics of an abandoned idea left to wilt in pursuit of something else that hasn’t been fully delivered yet, like a vestigial tail of the WordPress UI.

3. Calypso. Matt challenged the community to “learn javascript, deeply”, and a year later at the 2016 State of the Word, we had the REST API in Core and a demo of Calypso, a new admin interface built with javascript and the REST API. Calypso stood out to me at the time not just for the tech behind it, but because it was a major initiative developed for and launched on .com only. Automattic can certainly do this, but it felt like a procedural departure or change in philosophy.²⁴ Whether it was or not, we might suggest that perhaps this is an indication that Automattic (.com) needed the UI upgrade more acutely than the rest of the community (.org) did.

4. Concern for Market Share. In the same SOTW 2016 presentation, Matt announced a “WordPress Growth Council” to help maintain market share, indicating that Matt was already thinking about preserving and increasing market share at a time when WordPress already commanded a very dominant position — 58.8% of the CMS market, or 25.6% of all sites.²⁵ While market share is clearly a driving force for him, it’s generally a corporate concern and not a FLOSS ideal. Planning in this way can be viewed positively as being visionary, but this is more important to corporate market share than to FLOSS market share.²⁶

Automattic needed Gutenberg more than by the community did, and controlled the project direction to largely allow Core to accumulate technical debt for two years before launching Gutenberg to a lukewarm reception.

5. Gutenberg. As of the 2017 State of the Word address, Gutenberg had been in development for 11 months and would take another year to merge into Core, with no major releases between. With groundwork laid by the REST API and Calypso proof-of-concept,²⁷ Gutenberg now had almost all of the development focus. Seeing 5.0 at the end of 2018, a large part of the community resisted, feeling it wasn’t yet ready to be the default editor. Moreover, Gutenberg was needed by Automattic more than by the community, but with Automattic as the largest contribution sponsor, it controlled the project direction in support of Gutenberg. The upshot is that Core development had been effectively put on hold and allowed to accumulate further technical debt for two years in order to launch Gutenberg, to reception that was lukewarm at best.

Gutenberg was a Turning Point

 What does all this tell us? Gutenberg has turned out to be a ten-year initiative, a major undertaking of its own that is bigger than the Core CMS it’s being bolted into. Core has had comparatively little attention for the past eight years.²⁸ as Gutenberg chews up resources to the detriment of the rest of Core, with even the “official” performance team’s efforts remaining in an un-merged plugin. Despite Gutenberg dominating the project focus for 40% of its history, I’ll add one more to the litany of “WordPress is not” statements: WordPress is not Gutenberg.

WordPress is not Gutenberg.

Gutenberg was meant to be a turning point for WordPress, but in fewer ways than it was. Facing a loss of market share to SaaS solutions and the rise in popularity of page builders for WordPress suggested the need for a block editor in Core.²⁹ At the outset, the community already had a variety of options in the page builder space — but none were in core. Production-ready or not, the intentional turning point was reached by adding a modern block-based browser. The unintentional turning point was Gutenberg’s mediocre reception, making it a target of criticism and the trigger for a fork of WordPress. I don’t blame Gutenberg, which I see as a symptom and not as the problem. By the time it was halfway through development toward merging it into core, the community was already starting to fracture under Matt’s leadership. The fissures were small — at first.

Understanding Why We’re Here

Matt’s Needs ≠ Community Needs

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.

Eric Raymond

Something I’ve been saying for a while (before this past September) is that Matt’s needs are no longer the same as the Community’s needs, if they ever were.³⁰ Up until 2017 or so, they were aligned closely enough that everyone was being served by the project goals as they had been set for Automattic’s need to increase market share, as most of the product improvements that had been the focus also benefited the community. But here’s the thing: while open source project goals are largely focused on meeting a need, market share is a commercial concern. From a FLOSS perspective, the itch was scratched long ago,³¹ leaving market share as either a vanity or a revenue goal. There’s a tipping point for network value in a FLOSS project, which is reached when you have enough people in the community to maintain the software and support its users. This is an intrinsic measure (the need is met; the itch is gone), and not an extrinsic one, like market share (is anyone scratching more itches than I am?).³²

Automattic has different needs from those of the WordPress Community because it largely has different competitors on a different scale.

Matt’s needs are Automattic’s needs rather than the Community’s needs;³³ the gap has been widening, and don’t line up closely enough anymore. To explain, think about customers and competitors. In the CMS space, the Community members have either no competitors (they are end users of the software to directly or indirectly to compete in other markets), or their competitors are other agencies, developers, and freelancers. This sometimes means the second group competes with each other, but the primary objective for them is to offer an advantage over platforms recommended by competitors outside the community. This type of competition occurs on a site-by-site and project-by-project basis, and an army of community members have built WordPress’ network value in precisely this way.³⁴ One-by-one addition builds market share, but it’s not a primary strategy for doing so at scale when looking at aggregate numbers is your benchmark. A primary strategy might be building a networked community of evangelists who go out and win users one by one.³⁵

Matt has different competitors — or Automattic has, but they’re inseparable, and those interests come ahead of the community’s.³⁶ Automattic’s competitors are Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Duda, Weebly, and GoDaddy, along with a basket of hosting companies offering a managed WordPress product, like WP Engine and a number of smaller ones in addition to PaaS companies like Vercel. Like Automattic itself, these are big players competing in bulk for market share, and Matt needs volume.

WordPress Market Share?

In a FLOSS project, the goal isn’t to establish a crushing market share that decimates competitors. Those kinds of monopolistic goals tend to be about money, power, or both.

In a FLOSS project, the goal isn’t to establish a crushing market share that decimates competitors. Those kinds of monopolistic goals tend to be about money, power, or both, while FLOSS projects rarely pursue even a dominant market share as a stated goal, unless that goal has some philosophical, moral, or ethical point behind it. An example might be to “democratize publishing,” or it might be that your software “protects the Internet from being overtaken by businesses or governments who may not have the world’s interests at heart.”³⁷ or maybe you’re just doing your part to help ensure a largely spam-free email experience. In the case of WordPress, I would say the goal of democratizing publishing was achieved long ago by the internet itself.³⁸ Despite being the stated goal, it’s not used as a factor in decision making, which suggests it’s no longer the mission, if it ever was. A larger market share doesn’t actually serve that goal, nor does Gutenberg. So why is Matt so committed to Gutenberg, and so concerned about CMS market share that he’s smugly said things like “We grew a Drupal in market share last year” — and in more than one State of the Word address?

Market Share: The Other Numbers

The first competitors on Matt’s list are made up of hosted CMSs. WordPress currently has 62% of the CMS market share.³⁹ This is something of a triumph for WordPress, with almost 10x the market share of its next competitor. Matt’s problem is that the 62% isn’t his, it’s shared across the entire community and the ecosystem it supports. “Matt’s hobby site,” wordpress.org, touches all those sites, but his commercial site, wordpress.com holds just a fraction of them. Since the software is free, this shouldn’t matter – except when it does.

For the community, one of WordPress’ greatest strengths is avoiding vendor-lock to a CMS platform or host, and it’s those hosted CMSs that have to worry Matt. These are basically all growing, and when you hold as much of the market as WordPress does, pretty much anyone’s growth is going to come at your expense.Gutenberg was meant to address the biggest difference between WordPress and the hosted CMSs at the time: the editing experience. Back in 2014, wordpress.com was less flexible and offered fewer features than it does today⁴⁰

But there’s another angle, with a very different story:⁴¹ Automattic only has 0.8% of the hosting market, well down from Shopify’s 4.7%, Wix’ 3.3%, Squarespace’s 2.2% and just barely ahead of Webflow (0.7%) and Duda (0.6%), none of which are as old as WordPress.⁴² This illustrates where Automattic is in a crowded market with a small share. Restricting the hosting offer to WordPress means offering a hosted CMS — like WP Engine or MPMU Dev or many others do. Matt can view the non-WP hosted CMSs as a threat to his hosting market share, which is a significant piece of Automattic’s recurring revenue.⁴³ For Matt, the problem with WordPress is that he has to share its market — and the revenue — with others.

For this reason, what Matt needs and what the community needs are two different things.⁴⁴

As a WordPress MU (Multisite) installation, the .com version of WordPress had less flexibility available to offer individual users.⁴⁵ The limited flexibility of a decade ago was expanded, but they were already behind in the game, and the community may continue to see the .com product offering as a hobbled implementation that may not support what they want to do.⁴⁶

So if you were Matt competing with Shopify for market share, what would you do? You’d probably buy WooCommerce (acquired in 2015). If you also had to overcome the perception that .com was hobbled and offered less than competitors who allowed installs of the .org version of WordPress, you’d work on expanding the flexibility you could offer in your hosting product. You might launch a VIP service (back in 2006) or increase what you could offer regular users, but you might also buy another brand to compete more directly with other managed WordPress hosts. Something like Pressable, for example (acquired in 2016). You might even create a PaaS offer, like wp.cloud. Bluehost moved onto wp.cloud infrastructure in 2024, so although it won’t be reflected in market share, Automattic is actually providing infrastructure to host 1.7% of the market — the same as WP Engine.⁴⁷

WP Engine is something of an outlier. With half the history of Automattic, they’ve got twice the market share, offering the same thing: a hosted, managed instance of WordPress. When they were founded in 2010, WP Engine’s product offer would have been more robust than Automattic’s, at least outside of VIP (launched in 2006). Perhaps WP Engine executed a better marketing plan and crafted the better hosted WordPress product offering instead of the stripped-down .com version.⁴⁸ By migrating Bluehost onto its infrastructure, Automattic’s capacity would appear to be similar to WP Engine’s. They’re effectively providing infrastructure for a similar number of sites, but Automattic’s revenue from the operation will be a fraction of WP Engine’s. WP Engine has points of presence in 14 of Google’s datacenters, while Automattic maintains a presence in 27 datacenters globally. This isn’t a measure of capacity, but Automattic likely has some excess to fill.⁴⁹

And Here We Are.

Leadership of a FLOSS project must be more concerned with community than with shareholders, and for this reason, it takes a different kind of leadership.

Most conclusions about how it’s come to this point will be simplistic. Obviously there are many factors with different weighting and impact that combine in a complex manner, but the task is to somehow make sense of the way they’ve combined to produce the result we have, sorting out symptoms from causes. What I’ve outlined is an attempt to do this, and while not comprehensive, I believe there’s enough of a thread to explain it. The presenting factors over the past 10-12 years can help explain how and why WordPress has lost its way. At the same time, Automattic has likely not lost its way, as Matt’s leadership there seems to look after its corporate interests quite well.⁵⁰ Leadership of a FLOSS project must be more concerned with community than with shareholders, and for this reason, it takes a different kind of leadership that I don’t believe Matt has been able to effectively provide for some time now.

Abuse of Power & Public Controversies

Going back 15 years or more, we’ve seen a number of instances where Matt has abused the power he holds over the project and the platform it gives him to speak. Going back to Envato and Thesis, we see the same kind of vindictiveness and retributive behaviour as we’ve now seen with WP Engine. It’s only gotten worse, with a clown emoji being enough reason to block or ban people — no matter who they are. Controversial statements tend to become PR fiascos as Matt rarely backs down from them. He’s said “once every five years or so” isn’t bad for these sorts of controversies, but the fact is that he starts them and escalates them with questionable actions — and, it seems, increasing frequency.

FLOSS Ideals versus Matt’s Ideals

While Matt openly and strongly supports the GPL, many of the other ideas he holds are inconsistent with long-established open source principles, particularly where economics are concerned.

Matt’s ideals do not fully align with historical forms of the hacker ethic and FLOSS ethos. While he openly and strongly supports the GPL, many of the other ideas he holds are inconsistent with long-established open source principles, particularly where economics are concerned.. This is seen clearly in his use of the free rider problem as a basis for “Five for the Future” and his use of “The Tragedy of the Commons” to support his actions in attempting to force WP Engine to contribute, casually dismissing sound evidence against it.

WordPress Mission

With the democratization of publishing not needing assistance, the stated mission of the project is questionable, and is not considered in any decision-making processes in the way that most organizations would ask how a new initiative serves their mission. Since the stated mission provides no direction, other goals and objectives, mostly unstated, tend to drive the project.⁵¹

Matt’s Concern for Market Share

With market share celebrated as a marker of project success, direction is set with this as a goal. As market share is a corporate KPI, the open source project objectives and direction are significantly impacted by the needs of Automattic as its major contribution sponsor.

Gutenberg’s Failure to Deliver

Gutenberg shows the hallmarks of a failed software project.

Gutenberg doesn’t have to be labeled a bad idea or a poor product for it’s main flaws and unintended impact to be acknowledged. Having failed to meet its objectives in a timely manner and under-delivering on its expected ease of use, Gutenberg shows the hallmarks of a failed software project. WordPress core accumulated technical debt while development efforts focused on Gutenberg, and has not made a plan to address it.

Matt’s Leadership

Lacking the formal structures necessary for a successful BDFL (or any) model of open source project governance, the project faces significant risk of non-benevolent actions by its leader. With increasing public criticism from the community, Matt’s actions have become increasingly more chaotic since September 2024. A number of appeals for governance reform have been made, with a lack of any receptivity on Matt’s part.⁵²

The Bottom Line

Matt has a fiduciary duty to Automattic’s shareholders, but with no formal governance structure in place for the open source project, he has no such duty toward it.

It isn’t not about the bottom line. The common thread is that Matt’s decisions about the project direction are more heavily influenced by Automattic’s needs than by the community’s needs. Although he has a fiduciary duty to Automattic’s shareholders, with no formal governance structure in place toward the open source project, Matt has no such duty. As the needs of each became increasingly less aligned, the fault lines began to show, with increasing stressors on the relationship between Matt and the wider community. Given Matt’s behaviour has become increasingly less predictable, the community faces the increased risk of being cut off from the project into which they’ve poured countless.volunteer hours — and some have already been locked out.

There’s naturally a lot of talk about what to to next, and everything’s about to come down to governance.

Where do You Share?

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Where do You Share?

• Share on Bluesky
• Share on Facebook
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Reddit
• Share on X
• Share on WhatsApp
• Share on Pocket
• Share on Threads

Notes

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Related Posts

1. Why Unmasking The Tragedy of the Commons Matters
2. Breaking the Status Quo: A New Roadmap
3. Breaking the Status Quo: How it Came to this (This Post)