Since Matt Mullenweg started trying to extort WP Engine, the issue of who owns and controls the website for WordPress, WordPress.org, has come up again and again. Curiously, Matt Mullenweg has claimed in various locations that he personally owns and controls it, while not disclosing on the website. For example, on September 25 he wrote on the News blog on the website that “What I will tell you is that, pending their legal claims and litigation against WordPress.org,” that was despite there being no legal action threatened against WordPress.org (but was threatened against him). By comparison, in an October 4 story from The Verge, he claimed “WordPress.org just belongs to me personally.” That changed in a post today on the News blog of the WordPress website where he stated “but also me individually as the owner of WordPress.org.”

The About page of the website still reads as if the website is for the WordPress project, instead of his personal website as he claims elsewhere.

The new post misleads about other things. One is a claim about WordPress.org being run by volunteers. At the beginning of the post he wrote “[i]n order to give myself and the many tired volunteers around WordPress.org a break for the holidays.” It is an odd thing considering that one of his claims for why he was trying to extort WP Engine was that they were not funding enough non-volunteer involvement in the WordPress project. In doing that, he and others have touted how much non-volunteer involvement in the project comes from Automattic.

Another issue with that is plenty of people involved in the specific things that are being paused are not run by volunteers. One of the things paused are “New plugin directory submissions.” The team running that handles that has long held out that they were volunteers even when none of them were. Maybe unsurprisingly, that has occurred when half the team were direct employees of Matt Mullenweg.

The two team reps, which are the leaders of a WordPress team, are sponsored in that:

SiteGround sponsors [redacted] to contribute 15 hours per week to the Plugins team.

Hostinger sponsors [redacted] to contribute 15 hours per week to the Plugins team.

So are the Senior Team members (the latter two there are employed to work on WordPress by Matt Mullenweg’s Audrey Capital):

Awesome Motive sponsors chriscct7 to contribute 40 hours per week to the following teams: CLI, Core, Meta, and Plugins.

Scott Reilly contributes 40 hours per week to the following teams: Documentation, Meta, Photos, and Plugins.

Samuel Wood (Otto) contributes 50 hours per week to the following teams: Core, Documentation, Meta, Photos, Plugins, Support, and Themes.

Four of the Plugin Reviewers are also sponsored:

Hostinger sponsors [redacted] to contribute 15 hours per week to the Plugins team.

Elementor and Omnisend sponsor [redacted] to contribute 40 hours per week to the Plugins team.

Zao sponsors [redacted] to contribute 5 hours per week to the Plugins team.

XWP sponsors [redacted] to contribute 10 hours per week to the following teams: Core, Documentation, Plugins, and Polyglots.

And so is one of the Plugin Administration members:

Automattic sponsors [redacted] to contribute 40 hours per week to the following teams: Community, Plugins, and Support.

Then there are the Automattic employees who are not disclosed to be members of the team, but have significant control over the team.

A holiday break is one thing. But he is explicitly threatening that those paused activities might not come back, “I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year.”

What he has done has actually created new work for non-volunteers as well.

He also claimed that WP Engine is engaged in legal attacks against him, “[r]ight now much of the time I would spend making WordPress better is being taken up defending against WP Engine’s legal attacks.” What that actually refers to is the legal action that WP Engine took after he continued his extortion campaign against them. WP Engine probably would be happy to settle the lawsuit and move on, since as they were responding to an extortion campaign.