As part of Matt Mullenweg’s extortion campaign against a competitor of his for-profit company Automattic, has focused on contributions to WordPress measured by the Five for the Future program. That is a program created by him and, based on recent activity, controlled by employees of his company Automattic. Here is how he compared Automattic’s activity to the competitor’s activity on his own blog in a post from September 17:

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours.

One thing he said there is interesting, he said this didn’t count him. So is saying that his involvement in the project is in his role with Automattic. That would be a problem. The head of WordPress is actually working for a for-profit company instead of WordPress. He is not alone in that. The only other person who appears to have an overall role in controlling WordPress is the Executive Director of WordPress. Who, according to their own website, “also leads Automattic‘s open source division.” Automattic employees also have control of various elements of without any explanation or justification as to why that is.

Despite that level of control, including WordPress appearing fit in to Automattic’s organization chart, Automattic employees are quick to push back that WordPress is a part of Automattic. Take this comment from an employee on a YouTube video, ‘Would encourage you to be careful saying “WP/Automattic” when the WordPress project is so much more than Automattic and always should be.’ We ran across that video because the employee had linked to it in a comment on a post about Automattic hiring someone to be the Head of WordPress.org YouTube. Why is that person being given a role in WordPress based on having been hired by Automattic? That post was written on a “news outlet” owned by Matt Mullenweg, which didn’t disclose his ownership in that post despite the obvious need to.

In a September 1 post on the WordPress website written by one Automattic employee with input from another, overall Five for the Future stats were provided:

8,314 self-sponsored contributors have pledged 116,530 hours
905 company-sponsored contributors have pledged 7,838 hours

According to that, overall there were 124,368 hours being pledged to WordPress every week. So Automattic is only providing about 3% of the total hours provided. How does it make sense they have so much control over WordPress, while by their own metric they are doing so little?

We should note here that the pledges for the Five for the Future seem to largely be false, so the real numbers are probably very different. But that is the metric that Matt Mullenweg wants to use and clearly some of the pledging from Automattic isn’t real.

The level of control that Matt Mullenweg and Automattic have over WordPress has long hindered the addressing of security issues with WordPress and recently it also has been exposed to create yet another security issue.