[AlienRobot]

Have you read this? https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/23/wp-engine-sends-cease-and-...

>Last week, in a blog post, Mullenweg said WP Engine was contributing 47 hours per week to the “Five for the Future” investment pledge to contribute resources toward the sustained growth of WordPress. Comparatively, he said Automattic was contributing 3,786 hours per week. He acknowledged that while these figures are just a “proxy,” there is a large gap in contribution despite both companies being a similar size and generating around a half billion dollars in revenue.

It seems to me that it isn't a simple "dispute." Automattic is contributing to WP org, but WP Engine isn't. If WP org was completely neutral, they still would have reasons to side with Automattic over WP Engine on this.

[munbun]

That’s really not a fair statement from him given:

1. Based on their github orgs, there is effectively no separation between wordpress.org and Automattic.

2. The core WP contributors trac has a long history of not really being welcome to new contributions. Outside of the design decisions coming from Automattic, third party contributions either die in multi-year deliberations or get directed to the plugin system.

3. The development culture around WP, which largely revolves around the plugin ecosystem - has always trended towards paid plugins over OSS software.

[that_guy_iain]

The quote says WP Engine is contributing. WP Engine also gave WP.org 75k in sponsorship money, I would say that's a contribution. It's also important to know that after WP.org took that 75k sponsorship money, they kicked them out of the event they sponsored.

[ttul]

I suspect that his figure on the number of hours is somewhat cooked up and biased. Did he cite a reliable and reasonable source of data that we can all consult to check the veracity of this claim?

[ValentineC]

The numbers are on WordPress.org's Five for the Future website:

- https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledge/automattic/

- https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledge/wp-engine/