The creator of WordPress throwing shade at other companies because they are not contributing back enough is a bad look.
To make his point, Mullenweg compared the Five For the Future contributions from Automattic and WP Engine, a competitor of similar size. Automattic contributes 3,786 hours per week, while WP Engine contributes just 47.
40 hours a week contributing back to an open source project seems pretty good. I mean, wtf is this comparison in the first place, Automattic is the governing company for WordPress. WPEngine is a webhost that specializes in hosting WordPress.
This is not the first time Mullenweg has discussed this point. “Those who care about the future of WordPress should spend their dollars with less parasitic companies,” he said in 2022.
Pantheon, another host that specializes in WordPress, pledges even less than WPEngine. Are they also parasitic?
Anyways, I think that Automattic would prefer you used their VIP services and spent your enterprise hosting dollars with them rather than WPE or even Pantheon.
Automattic profits from all of the open source contributions and has commercial interest in exploiting those contributors and their efforts. I think, ideally, WordPress would be independent and under the stewardship of a community governing body, and not by a company with commercial interest in the project.
I wonder if the next thing we hear about is a license change similar to what Hashicorp, Redis, Elastic, recently(ish) went through.
update
wow, cringe ass post by creator of WordPress -> wordpress.org/news/2024… I’m not really following the logic. WordPress offers a PHP constant to disable revisions so it’s not like WPEngine is mangling things..
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0);
In my experience WP revisions are often a cause of performance issues, so it makes sense to me disable them. Is it weird they do that? Maybe, but its likely due to infrastructure limitations. If you need them use a 3rd party that handles revisions better.
This man hates WPEngine 😂
p.s.
Automattic themselves, via Wordpress.com, offers “something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.” so the hypocrisy is something.
