Recently the head of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, was complaining about the time and energy he was having to expend on the project. If this wasn’t performative, you would reasonably expect that he would hand off work to others. One place that could happen is with the Release Lead role for next release of WordPress. That role is supposed to be the “community member ultimately responsible for” a release of WordPress. But in reality, going back through the last 15 releases, he had that role 12 times. Two employees of his company, Automattic, handled the other two. On Friday afternoon, though, it was announced that he again would be taking on that role.

From a security perspective, having a new release lead would be an opportunity for someone who might allow known security issues with WordPress and fairly easy to implement security improvements to finally be implemented. That unfortunately hasn’t been of interest to Matt Mullenweg and those other Automattic employees. Hopefully, not because of the business interest in Automattic selling security solutions.

WordPress has made a big thing of promoting diversity, which it fails to follow through when it comes to having those not working for Automattic or his investment vehicle, Audrey Captial, allowed to have decision-making authority in WordPress.