Last week, Automattic announced that they would be reducing how many hours they claim to contribute to the WordPress project under the Five for the Future program. (The accuracy of the Five for the Future pledges in general seem highly suspect.) At the time, the post didn’t have an author shown, but ended “– The Automattic Team.” Since then, the design of Automattic’s website has been updated, causing the credited author of the post to be displayed. You can now see it is listed as Mary Hubbard:

Here was how it looked before:

That would be the Mary Hubbard who is the new Executive Director of WordPress.org, who the head of WordPress and Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, conspicuously didn’t mention was an Automattic employee when he announced her taking that position. (While managing to mention she previously worked there to justify her getting the position.) The announcement hardly reads like something that would come from someone representing the WordPress community instead of being a representative of Automattic. Take this section, which puts the community in scare quotes:

We’ve also faced intense criticism and even personal attacks against a number of Automatticians from members of the “community” who want Matt and others to step away from the project.

It is in line with how the previous Executive Director of WordPress, who was the head of Automattic’s open source division (which also wasn’t disclosed when they were announced in the position), reacted to a previous Matt Mullenweg blowup with members of the community last year.

Having leadership so aligned with Automattic creates a host of potential or very real conflicts of interests. That certainly includes security, considering that Automattic sells solutions claiming to address security issues that would be much bettered addressed by finally address the many known issues with WordPress’ handling of security.

We should note that previously she was listed as the author in the source code of the page, but no one seems to have picked up on that.