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Automattic is escalating the legal dispute with WordPress host WP Engine. As the company, which is headed by WordPress inventor Matt Mullenweg, announced in its blog, it is drastically reducing the work of its programmers on the open source CMS. This decision was made because the pending lawsuits from WP Engine and its investor Silver Lake were taking up too much time and energy.
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The company now wants to reduce its own involvement until it is in line with that of its opponent. WP Engine contributes little and thus creates an imbalance, according to the accusation. Automattic plans to have its developers work 45 hours per week on WordPress – this work will probably go mainly into security and other critical updates.
A look at the “Five for the Future” program, in which the WordPress project bundles personnel and financial support from beneficiary companies, shows just how drastic this reduction is. Automattic currently donates 1430 hours per week, which means it intends to invest 97 percent less development time in the future. As the corresponding profile page on “Five for the Future” explains, these hours are split between almost one hundred employees in 17 teams across the WordPress ecosystem.
These employees will work on more lucrative projects in the future: Such as the commercial blog platform wordpress.com, Pressable, Jetpack and WooCommerce. But it doesn’t have to stay that way, the blog article concludes: As soon as the legal attacks from WP Engine cease, they will happily return to working on the open source CMS.
CMS ecosystem as the victim?
The announcement is one of several steps taken by Automattic under Matt Mullenweg against its competitor WP Engine since September. The conflict was triggered by disputes over WP Engine’s involvement in the development of the CMS, the use of the abbreviation “WP” and a disputed back payment of license fees.
Mullenweg’s company had also locked out the competition from WordPress’ own plugin marketplace and hijacked a popular plugin without further ado. Automattic was recently prohibited from doing so by a court, which the company is now apparently responding to by refusing to work. The code quality of the CMS project and therefore the entire user community is likely to suffer as a result.
(cku)
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