To immediately understand why this is going to have a number of implications on WordPress, it’s because Automattic was the largest contributor to open source WordPress.
From afar.
I mean really, really far.
For historical context, second contributor contribution hours range from approximately 100 to 400, with 200 being the most common amount. This is also not a firmly established position as Automattic holds the top spot. But you don’t have to be a math whiz to understand that a few hundred doesn’t equal 4,000.
With the news so fresh, we don’t really know the consequences yet – or even if there will be any. For all we know, Matt could reverse this decision in a week or two in the same way he lifted the “vacation” he announced at the end of December. 3 I don’t think it will, but these days in WordPress anything is possible.
That said, let’s assume it won’t change course in the foreseeable future and discuss four (possible) effects this will have on open source WordPress.
Four Possible Implications of Automattic’s Cut to Contribution Hours
The WordPress community is passionate, vocal and very active online. So it’s no surprise that there has already been a lot of discussion about what we can expect in light of Automattic’s announcement. I think the following four areas deserve further consideration:
Let’s talk about them.
Loss of critical documentation and knowledge infrastructure
A very recent blog post from long-time Automattic contributor – Anne McCarthy – gives us both little and a big window into the comprehensive documentation that is about to disappear from the WordPress development ecosystem. 4
Little in the sense that she is only one contributor among many others.
But big in the sense that his specific contributions are significant enough to be just one person.
Anne has worked at Automattic since 2014. As a member of the core team and a significant contributor across multiple teams (including Documentation, Testing, and Community), she has played a crucial role in the organization and accessibility of WordPress development.
And his contribution hours were reduced to zero.
Nothing. Nada. Naah-ting.
In her message, she lists seven areas that will be affected by the change. The very first one she puts forward – “the Source of Truth” – is also the most critical:
Next on the list was his contribution to the publishing roadmap, which took him years of experience to truly master. As she herself stated:
“It’s hard to start from scratch, but when you have a few releases under your belt, you start to see the flow of features coming from version X but planned for Y and you can plan accordingly.”
This is the kind of institutional knowledge you can’t replace overnight.
As of this writing, she is the only person to have written a detailed blog post about her personal contributions and what their loss will mean in practice – which also leaves us wondering – how many other Annes are responsible for similar critical infrastructure documentation it will now go away pouf in the abyss of WordPress?
Security and development monitoring issues
I already mentioned this in the introduction, but let’s talk about the numbers for a moment because they’re worth mentioning again.
A year ago, the Automattic contributor spent hours Five for the future it looked like this:
