To understand immediately why this is going to have a number of implications across WordPress, it’s because Automattic was the single largest contributor to open-source WordPress.
By far.
I mean really, really far.
For historical context, the second place contributor’s hours have ranged from about 100 to 400, with 200-ish being the most common amount. It also hasn’t been a firmly held position in the way Automattic has held the number one spot. But it doesn’t take a math prodigy to understand that a couple hundred is not anywhere near 4,000.
With the news so fresh, we don’t truly know the fallout yet – or even if there will be one. For all we know, Matt might reverse this decision in a week or two in the same way that he lifted the “holiday break” he announced in late December. 3 I don’t anticipate he will, but these days in WordPress, anything is possible.
Having said that, let’s assume he won’t be changing course for the foreseeable future and discuss four (possible) effects this will have on open-source WordPress.
Four possible implications of Automattic’s reduction to contributor hours
The WordPress community is passionate, vocal, and very active online. So unsurprisingly, there’s already been a lot of chatter about what we can expect in light of Automattic’s announcement. I believe that the following four areas deserve a closer look:
Let’s talk about them.
Loss of critical documentation and knowledge infrastructure
A very recent blog post from a long-term Automattic contributor – Anne McCarthy – gives us both a small and a large window unto the extensive documentation that’s about to vanish from the WordPress development ecosystem. 4
Small in the sense that she is only one contributor of many.
But large in the sense that her specific contributions are rather sizable for being only one person.
Anne has been with Automattic since 2014. As a Core Team member and significant contributor across multiple teams (including Documentation, Testing, and Community), she’s played a crucial role in keeping WordPress development organized and accessible.
And her contributor hours were just cut to zero.
Zilch. Nada. Naah-ting.
In her post, she lists seven areas that will be impacted by the change. The very first one she highlights – “the Source of Truth” – is also the most critical:
Next on the list was her contribution toward the release roadmap, which took her years of experience to truly master. As she stated herself:
“When starting from scratch, it’s hard but, when you have a few releases under your belt, you start to see the flow of features punted from X release but slated for Y and can plan accordingly.”
This is the kind of institutional knowledge you can’t simply replace overnight.
As of the time of this writing, she is the only person to write a detailed blog post about her personal contributions and what their loss will mean in practice – which also leaves us wondering – how many other Annes are responsible for similar critical infrastructure documentation that is now just going to go poof into the WordPress abyss?
Security and development oversight concerns
I already mentioned this in the intro, but let’s talk numbers for a second because they are worth mentioning again.
One year ago, Automattic’s contributor hours to Five for the Future looked like this:
