Challenging Five for the Future
How does “Five for the Future” define a contribution, and how should the community?
Before today’s topic, I wanted to mention that I’ve started creating occasional posts that include links to things I’m reading, watching, or listening to. These are for subscribers only, but hey, it’s free to subscribe, if it’s something you might be interested in.
On to today’s topic…
The underlying premise of Matt Mullenweg’s war against WP Engine, as publicly expressed by Mullenweg himself, is that WP Engine has not contributed enough to “WordPress.”[1] Late last year, in the Post Status Slack, Mullenweg wrote of Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín’s order for a preliminary injunction:[2]
It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this. I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine.
Mullenweg has used other terms to describe WP Engine, for example calling the company “takers” instead of “makers.” The one-page document sent to WP Engine “styled as a trademark license agreement”[3] pushed this implication further, noting that WP Engine could forego payment to Automattic and, instead, donate $32 million in engineering support to WordPress, at the direction of “WordPress.org.”[4]
The premise of these statements and documents remains the same: WP Engine hasn’t contributed enough to WordPress. The metric for this statement, since the start of the war, appears to be Five for the Future. Given this, I think it’s worth unpacking the Five for the Future program, thinking about what “counts” as a WordPress contribution, and what barriers may prevent a company from contributing directly to WordPress.
Five for the Future origins
In 2014, at WordCamp Europe,[5] Mullenweg was questioned about contributions to WordPress, and his thoughts on them. He answered, and followed up with a blog post, which stated, in part (his emphasis):
I think a good rule of thumb that will scale with the community as it continues to grow is that organizations that want to grow the WordPress pie (and not just their piece of it) should dedicate 5% of their people to working on something to do with core — be it development, documentation, security, support forums, theme reviews, training, testing, translation or whatever it might be that helps move WordPress mission forward.
The fundamental idea of Five for the Future is that, to support WordPress over the long term, companies with a stake in the ecosystem should devote 5% of their “people” to WordPress contributions. In this original post, Mullenweg specifically says “core”, but the description afterwards clearly shows he meant any of the WordPress contribution “teams.” Since his post, those teams, as defined on make.wordpress.org, have grown to include 23[6] distinct contribution areas.[7]
As the WordPress ecosystem has grown in the intervening decade, so to have the companies within that ecosystem. From Automattic to WP Engine, XWP to Syde, Bluehost to SiteGround—with WordPress’ marketshare over 40%, every company has seen tremendous growth. But, with that growth, comes risk.
If WordPress is going to survive for the next decade, if it’s going to thrive and grow, the WordPress community must also survive, thrive, and grow. Mullenweg believes that the best approach to ensuring WordPress’ success over the long term is encouraging those with a stake in WordPress’ success to contribute back to the ecosystem, be it with development, documentation, etc. And, I find myself nodding in agreement at his post from 2014 as much today, as I did then.
We can, and should, debate whether there is an exact percentage that companies should contribute, or how that percentage should be defined.[8] But, I do agree that those with a vested interest in WordPress’ success should be the ones contributing the most to WordPress.
Let’s back up a bit, though.
What is a contribution?
The key message of the Five for the Future program is that contributions are key to the success of WordPress long term but, fundamentally, what is a contribution?
At first blush, it’s easy to look at the list of contribution teams on WordPress.org and assume any contribution to those teams is a contribution to the WordPress project and to “Five for the Future.” Let’s explore that idea a bit with a few hypotheticals:
- A 500-person WordPress company devotes 25 full time photographers to the Photos team (submitting photos).
- A 100-person WordPress company devotes 5 full time quality assurance testers to the Test team (testing WordPress and filing bugs).
- A 1000-person, global WordPress company devotes 50 full time employees, split evenly between the Polyglots team (translating WordPress) and the Support team (answering questions on the WordPress.org support forums).
Each of these contributions meet the letter of the Five for the Future program, and each of them arguably meet Mullenweg’s original premise: “whatever it might be that helps move WordPress mission forward.” But is this what you expect? WordPress has traditionally been quite engineering-led. If a large company had 50 full time employees contributing to WordPress and none of them were engineers, would the community consider that company a valued contributor?
Let’s look a bit further at the ecosystem and consider Mullenweg’s original Five for the Future goal: “whatever it might be that helps move WordPress mission forward.”
- Seeing SEO as an increasingly important need, a company creates an SEO plugin. The free version of the plugin is powerful, and the company commits to maintaining it and even expanding its feature set over time, in parallel with a paid version, the revenue of which helps maintain, develop, and support both plugins. Because of how quickly SEO best practices change, the plugin’s feature set would never be considered for WordPress core. Over 10 million WordPress sites use the plugin.
- Two companies create separate plugins, each focused on improving performance (and/or core web vitals) in different ways, and ways that may not be compatible with how WordPress sites work at scale (e.g. enterprise and headless), but are optimized for the vast majority of WordPress sites. Over 10 million WordPress sites collectively use the plugins.
- To enable drag-and-drop creation of WordPress websites, a company creates a plugin that makes building websites faster and easier for a large swath of users. The plugin exists prior to Gutenberg, but goes far beyond Gutenberg’s 2025 feature set. The code generated by the plugin is not fully compatible with Gutenberg nor necessarily ideal for the varied use cases of WordPress. Over 10 million WordPress websites use the plugin.
Each of the above scenarios quite clearly “move WordPress mission forward”, empowering more sites to move to WordPress. But, none of the above scenarios fit neatly into the Five for the Future program, as none involve direct contributions to any of the defined 23-and-counting teams.[9]
Now, look at WP Engine. Local, ACF, Genesis, Faust.js, and countless other WordPress plugins and products all work to “move WordPress mission forward.”[10][11] Arguably, so does the very existence of WP Engine, with its sales and marketing apparatus pushing WordPress into SMB[12] and enterprise markets, and its enterprise-level support offering, which gives confidence to procurement and risk management teams at Fortune 500 companies.
Should these contributions to the overall ecosystem “count” as part of the Five for the Future program? In starting his war with WP Engine, Mullenweg explicitly said “no”, but I don’t think it’s that cut and dry. The WordPress ecosystem is more than just WordPress core—while it’s impossible to put a number on it, without plugins like ACF, WordPress would not have grown as much as it has today.
Automattic’s demands and another conflict of interest
Setting aside any disagreement about what a contribution is, it’s important to look a bit closer at what Automattic and Mullenweg were demanding from WP Engine.
As I noted at the start, Mullenweg offered WP Engine an option to contribute employee time in lieu of paying Automattic to utilize the WordPress trademarks. Quoting that part of the term sheet (my emphasis):
(b) Commit 8% of its revenue in the form of salaries of WP Engine employees working on WordPress core features and functionality to be directed by WordPress.org. WP Engine will provide Automattic a detailed monthly report demonstrating its fulfillment of this commitment. WordPress.org and Automattic will have full audit rights, including access to employee records and time-tracking.
There are two stand out aspects to me.
First, Automattic was demanding WP Engine’s employees focus on “core features and functionality.” This seemingly devalues other, legitimate contributions to WordPress, ones that the Five for the Future landing page directly calls out, including “community building and management”, “translation and localization”, and “training and education,” among others.
Mullenweg’s messaging throughout the war has been that the trademark dispute is merely the hammer he’s using to push WP Engine into contributing. And, to showcase just how little WP Engine is contributing, he’s repeatedly referenced Five for the Future, and pledges made by WP Engine, Automattic, and other companies within the ecosystem. Looking closer, though, the one-page document sent to WP Engine “styled as a trademark license agreement” only values contributions to “WordPress core features and functionality.”
You, dear reader, may vehemently disagree with me about how to value ecosystem contributions like third-party (open-source) plugins, but contributions to the teams listed on WordPress.org must be considered contributions—the Five for the Future program says as much, as did Mullenweg in his initial post about the program. Could WP Engine not have contributed writers of documentation, translators of strings, and community organizers to meet any Five for the Future pledge?[13]
The second stand out aspect is the phrase “to be directed by WordPress.org.”
As we’ve also learned from this lawsuit, WordPress.org is not a real entity. It does not refer to the WordPress Foundation, nor does it refer to the (unincorporated) WordPress project. WordPress.org is solely owned by Mullenweg. In that light, the direction this document requires is solely from Mullenweg, or whomever he designates (e.g. Mary Hubbard, as the Executive Director of WordPress.org).
Imagine, for a moment, you devoted $32 million per year[14] of salaries—conservatively, 128 people[15]—only to have them directed not by your company or leadership, but by a competitor’s leadership. That is what this document from Automattic and Mullenweg demands of WP Engine.
Yes, it’s true, Mullenweg wears more hats than merely “CEO of Automattic” and, with his “WordPress project lead” hat on, perhaps he can manage WP Engine employees in a way that does not directly further Automattic’s interests. But, this is textbook conflict of interest.[16]
The barriers to contributing
But, backing up a bit… for the sake of argument, let’s accept that contributions only “count” if they are to one of the WordPress contribution teams, and let’s look past the crystal clear conflict of interest inherent in the demands from Mullenweg. Why would a company with a vested interest in the success of WordPress decide not to contribute directly to the WordPress project?
This is, perhaps, the heart of the underlying dispute.[17]
In the past, WP Engine has contributed to WordPress, and quite heavily so, though likely not 5% of their workforce. In 2022, WP Engine tooted its own horn, writing about the internal WordPress contributor days they were hosting. In the same post, they noted Nick Diego, then a Developer Advocate at WP Engine, had “led the charge”, and was a WordPress release team member as well.[18]
Flash back a couple of a years and, in 2020, WP Engine noted their commitment to Five for the Future, outlining a number of ways they’ve contributed to the ecosystem.[19] In that post, WP Engine also noted contributions to WordPress 5.0, which was released in December 2018.
Now, to be clear, these are PR posts. Every post on WP Engine’s blog (in and out of the WordPress Community category) should be taken with a healthy amount of skepticism.[20] What’s notable from these posts is the timeline. Silver Lake completed their investment in WP Engine in 2018, but WP Engine did not stop contributing at that point—contributions to WordPress releases continued well-after the acquisition.
From the outside, though, it’s clear that WP Engine reduced its direct contributions to the WordPress project. Why would that be? One answer may be barriers to contributing.
In my experience, a perpetual problem within the WordPress core community is the “backchannels” that exist, private spaces where contributors align on next steps. This is particularly acute with Automattic employees, which actively communicate in private spaces that do not include the community.[21] This can make sense—when working on a new feature or design, it’s useful to share with a smaller, safer audience, before sharing widely with thousands of people around the world, if not millions of people as blog posts can get picked up and reported as news.
However, the private communication comes at a cost.
For one, ideas that are iterated on in private often appear within WordPress (core and/or Gutenberg) with a fully formed vision that may not align with the broader needs of the community. Imagine spending weeks or months developing a new feature, iterating in private with fellow engineers. Within that bubble, it’s possible your work does not consider how the broader WordPress ecosystem uses WordPress, perhaps ignoring enterprise use cases, headless uses cases, SEO, etc.
For two, and more on-topic with this post, integrating external engineers is hard, especially when dozens of engineers work in a private space. In that context, it’s near impossible to include new contributors in the fold. What’s more, while new contributors must make their presence known and build community trust (“meritocracy”), new Automatticians, get de facto trust and are immediately included in Automattic-only private spaces.
The “private space” problem has existed within the community for well over a decade, and doesn’t speak to poor intentions—some Automatticians push their team to work in the open. But, quite honestly, this is a Sisyphean struggle, an uphill battle that’s nearly impossible to win against, especially when you have a single leader pushing back against progress.
That leader is, naturally, Mullenweg.
As project lead, you would think Mullenweg would want the WordPress project to operate in the open, including every Automattician under his employ alongside every contributor. But this just isn’t the case. Mullenweg falls victim to the same problem that each of his employees do: safe spaces are safe, and making direct contact with the people working on your product is faster and easier than publishing a post on WordPress.org or communicating in the open. As an example, it is my understanding that Mullenweg and Matías Ventura—until recently, the Lead Architect of Gutenberg—frequently communicated over direct messages as they iterated on Gutenberg. Each time Mullenweg is unhappy with a certain feature or has an idea for a product direction, he uses his access—and authority as employer of the majority of the Gutenberg leaders—to communicate directly with the relevant parties: designers, engineers, and, of course, Ventura himself.
All this isn’t to imply any nefarious intentions, but rather to outline the fact that, when a company wants to donate contribution time to WordPress, and to core in particular, there is a substantial hurdle to overcome: Mullenweg. Without his explicit approval, without his direct guidance, most core contributors will flail and look for other ways to contribute.[22]
Over time, we’ve seen corporate contributors rise and fall. From what I’ve seen in the past, that “fall” is frequently due to this issue. Short of finding a contribution area outside of his interest area, contributors must work at the behest of Mullenweg, who seems incapable of communicating openly with the broader community about day-to-day decisions and actions.
Putting it all together
Matt Mullenweg’s conflict with WP Engine stems from a view that WP Engine does not contribute enough, as defined by Mullenweg’s metric, the Five for the Future program. While Mullenweg argues for direct contributions to WordPress teams, the definition of a contribution to the ecosystem is unsettled, in my opinion. Ultimately, the conflict highlights the complexities of defining contributions and their impact on the WordPress ecosystem.
Building on this, Automattic’s demand for WP Engine to contribute to WordPress core features, at Mullenweg’s direction, highlights a conflict of interest and devalues other, valid contributions (again, as defined by Five for the Future). What’s more, barriers to contributing, including private communication channels, make it difficult for external engineers to integrate into the WordPress core community, with these barriers created by Mullenweg as he enables a culture that prioritizes internal collaboration over open contribution.
Legally, of course, Mullenweg is relying on alleged trademark violations, but that is merely the hammer he’s using against WP Engine, not the actual premise. In his WCUS talk in September 2024, which kicked off the war, Mullenweg outlined the “tragedy of the commons” and explicitly said that WP Engine is not contributing enough. During that talk, Mullenweg only mentioned “trademarks” a single time, heavily focusing on WP Engine’s lack of contributions. ↩︎
This was, of course, before he asked for his Post Status Slack account to be deleted, and all of his messages removed which, if you know anything about the law, certainly seems like a fun thing called “spoliation.” ↩︎
Using the words of Judge Martínez-Olguín. ↩︎
Which, as we now know, is solely Mullenweg. ↩︎
In the beautiful and wonderful city of Sofia, located in the stunning country of Bulgaria. Yes, this is an ad for Bulgaria: go visit! ↩︎
Arguably this is 22 distinct teams, as the Marketing team is defunct, though still listed on the landing page. ↩︎
Until January 8, 2025, there was a 24th team listed—Sustainability—which Mullenweg unilaterally shuttered. ↩︎
As an example, GoDaddy has a total headcount over 6,000 employees. Should it be devoting 300 employees to WordPress contributions in some way? Or would it be 5% of their WordPress business? ↩︎
In case you’re wondering: Yoast SEO; LightSpeed Cache and Google SiteKit; and Elementor. ↩︎
While many of WP Engine’s open source projects came via acquisitions, I consider their sourcing a distraction—WP Engine’s commitment to supporting and expanding these products in turn supports and expands the overall WordPress ecosystem. ↩︎
There was also WPGraphQL before Mullenweg started the war. Shortly after, he hired WPGraphQL’s lead engineer away from WP Engine, turning that hiring into a PR move. (And yes, I’m sorry about a double footnote here.) ↩︎
Small & Midsize Businesses. ↩︎
It is hard to call it a “pledge” or a “contribution” when it’s being demanded. And, if the one-page document indicates anything, the program might need to be called Eight for the Future, though it’s important to note that Five for the Future was never meant to be a percentage of revenue, but rather a percentage of headcount. ↩︎
The $32 million number comes from Mullenweg, who estimates it based on 8% of $400 million in annual revenue. WP Engine’s actual annual revenue is not publicly known. ↩︎
This assumes $250,000 total compensation (including salary, benefits, etc), which is very conservative. But, 128 people is wild. As a reminder (from two footnotes up), Five for the Future was supposed to be a percentage of headcount. Internet sources vary, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume WP Engine has 1000 employees—to meet the Five for the Future pledge, they should only need to dedicate 50 employees to WordPress, not the 128+ that Mullenweg is demanding. To put it another way, this demand is more than Automattic was contributing, even though it’s a significantly larger company by headcount. ↩︎
It’s getting increasingly difficult to untangle all of the conflicts of interest in this saga. Previously, I wrote a bit about conflicts of interest in a post about the WordPress Foundation, and a separate post about Salesforce & Newfold Digital. ↩︎
At least, as publicly messaged by Mullenweg. Since the beginning of this war, much of the rationale has felt weak, at best, and I’ve suspected other underlying factors are at play. ↩︎
Diego now works at Automattic in the same role. ↩︎
At the time, this included the Torque publication and the Press This podcast, both of which have stopped publication in September 2024, suspiciously around the time the war against WP Engine started. Naturally, this goes to my point around what counts as a contribution. ↩︎
As should every post on every corporate blog. ↩︎
During my time at Automattic, I pushed my team of WordPress contributors to communicate with me and other team members only on the WordPress Slack instance—in channels and DMs as applicable—reserving Automattic’s Slack for company communication. Similarly, our internal P2 was relatively untouched, as we opted to share with the broader community as a matter of course. Despite my team being relatively senior and used to communicating in the open, this wasn’t always successful, but we did our best to keep each other in check (myself included). ↩︎
This is actually counter to how most WordPress contribution teams function—the vast majority operate quite openly. Core and Gutenberg are the exception. ↩︎
