Automattic has announced that they are “realigning” their contributions to WordPress due to fending off “attacks” from the “community” and WP-Engine.

Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress.

In the interest of, as you put it, “secur[ing] the future of WordPress for generations to come,” I trust you’ll be releasing the WordPress trademark, core project management and the infrastructure at WordPress.org, (the latter of which which CEO Matt Mullenweg has repeatedly pointed out that he owns personally) over to the community so you can “focus on for-profit projects within Automattic” without the distraction of the wider WordPress ecosystem.

Either that, or you’ve just told the entire WordPress community — excuse me, “community,” I forgot to include the scare quotes you so meticulously included throughout your article — that we should never trust you to have the community’s interests at heart, only your own.

I suppose this means I should start looking for alternatives to the handful of Automattic-built plugins I’m still using, as it sounds like I shouldn’t anticipate them continuing to be maintained.

Update January 10: It gets worse. Mullenweg just deactivated the accounts of several high-profile people at WordPress-adjacent companies who dared to question his leadership, in a post that goes increasingly off the rails.