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Tag Archives: Five for the Future

30 Oct 2024

A Month On, a Glaring Problem With Five for the Future Pledges Hasn’t Been Addressed

When Matt Mullenweg publicly started going after WP Engine one issue that got a lot of attention was the disparity between how much time he’s company Automattic was claiming to sponsor its employee doing work for WordPress versus WP Engine. The metric being used, Five for the Future, has plenty of issues. One that has been out in the open, which we happened across, is that there are many pledges that couldn’t be real. At the time, Automattic was claiming to currently be providing sponsored to the Tide team, despite that team having gone inactive in early 2022. They were not alone, as there were 331 current pledges to the team. The story wasn’t all that different with another team, where there were 14 listed members of the team and 338 pledges. There is a form for reporting problems with pledges, though one that doesn’t seem designed for systematic issues, as you are supposed to report the URL of an individual pledge. We filed a report about those issues at the time, so what has happened more than a month on?

After our post about Automattic’s pledges, their Five for the Future page was updated and no longer lists time pledge to the Tide team. That appears to be unrelated, as that change came alongside many Automattic employees leaving the company. There were significant changes to Automattic’s pledging when those people left. [Read more]

2 Oct 2024

Why Does Automattic Have So Much Control of WordPress When It Provides So Little of the Pledged Five for the Future Hours?

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. [Read more]

25 Sep 2024

Automattic Employees Have Been Posting Highly Suspect Five for the Future Program Stats

Over the past two days, we have noted what appear to be large problems with the pledging of time to the WordPress Five for the Future program. That is important as the head of WordPress was criticizing a competitor of this for-profit company, Automattic, over their much smaller pledging to that. One thing that we found was that Automattic is pledging time to a group that appears to have been inactive for over two years. We also found that a team with 14 listed members had 338 people pledging contributions to the team. It turns out the divergence between members and pledges can go even higher than the 24 times for that team.

On July 25, an update was put out for the Community team stating that there were 60 people that contributed to the team: [Read more]

24 Sep 2024

The WordPress Plugin Review Team Has Only 14 Members, but 338 People Are Claiming to Be Involved in the Team

If you want to take a favorable view of the head of WordPress Matt Mullenweg’s criticism of WP engine, he was concerned about how much they are giving back to WordPress (the way WP Engine’s lawyer portrays it; it sounds like extortion). To do that, he was citing the disparity between their pledged time for WordPress through the Five for the Future program and his company’s. As we noted yesterday, that company, Automattic, claimed to pledging time to a team that appears to have last been active over two years ago. They were not alone, as there were 331 pledges for that team. Many of them didn’t look legitimate. That turns out to be a wider issue.

The Plugin Review Team, which is supposed to handling the security of the WordPress Plugin Directory, among other tasks, currently has 14 listed members: [Read more]

9 Dec 2022

Awesome Motive’s Not So Awesome Five for the Future Sponsorship of Plugin Security Reviewer for WordPress

The website of the WordPress focused company Awesome Motive paints them in an incredibly positive light. For example, one of their five core values is “We Do The Right Thing every time.”, which they explain this way:

When it’s right for the people, the company, and you’re proud of the decision, then it’s the right thing. Sometimes doing the right thing is hard, but doing it over is harder. This is why we must always do the right thing, every time. [Read more]