Automattic WordPress hoster is working on a legal dispute with WP Engine on the rise. As the company led by WordPress inventor Matt Mullenweg announced in its blog, it is significantly reducing the involvement of its programmers in the open source CMS. This decision was taken because too much time and energy was being consumed by the pending lawsuits between WP Engine and its investor Silver Lake.
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Now you want to reduce your commitment until it matches your opponent’s commitment. As per the allegation, WP Engine contributes very little and thus creates an imbalance. Automattic plans to have its developers working on WordPress 45 hours a week – this work will likely primarily go into security and other critical updates.
How drastic this cut is can be seen when you look at the “Five for the Future” program, in which the WordPress project bundles humanitarian and financial support from for-profit companies. Automattic is currently donating 1,430 hours per week and plans to invest 97 percent less development time in the future. As explained in the corresponding profile page of “Five for the Future”, these hours are divided among approximately a hundred employees across 17 teams in the WordPress ecosystem.
These employees will work on more exciting projects in the future: such as commercial blog platforms WordPress.com, Pressable, Jetpack and WooCommerce. But it doesn’t have to stay that way, concluded blog article: As soon as the legal attacks from WP Engine stop, they will happily return to work on the open source CMS.
CMS ecosystem as victim?
The announcement is one of several moves that Automattic, under Matt Mullenweg, has taken against its rival WP Engine since September. The conflict was sparked by disputes over WP Engine’s involvement in the development of the CMS, the use of the abbreviation “WP”, and the disputed additional payment of license fees.
Mullenweg’s company also fended off competition from WordPress’s own plugin marketplace and quickly hijacked a popular plugin. Automattic was recently banned from doing so by a court, to which the company is now apparently responding by refusing to do the work. The main thing that is likely to be affected by this is the code quality of the CMS project and thus the entire user base.
(CKU)
