Matt –
I had the pleasure of attending WCUS in Portland and was present for your presentation. In the broadest sense you believe that WP Engine is not contributing enough back to WordPress. I don’t believe the way it has been handled has been helpful to the community, in fact, I believe it has been harmful. I hope that trust can be regained and the Community can heal.
WordPress is many different things. For background, my understanding is that you, Matt Mullenweg, either owns or controls, Automattic, WooCommerce, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Audrey Capital, and the WordPress Foundation. The Foundation is a 501c(3) and has a board of directors. I assume they heed your advice.
You personally own WordPress.org and pay to “keep the lights on”. This includes the personnel and servers required to keep the APIs running. I am extremely grateful for that, as are we all.
From all the comments, posts and video I’ve seen in the past week it seems there are 2 primary “contribution” areas. Contributing to “the WordPress project” via Core contributions, hours, and more. I understand that Five for the Future doesn’t consider that sponsorship of events, participation in the forums, making plugins and themes, making tutorials, and other learning materials count as contributions to the project. I strongly disagree. I know we disagree with event sponsorship as a contribution but realistically the ROI is near zero. Personally I have helped sponsor many of my local Southern California WordCamps even before I ever had a product for sale.
The other area of expense I see referenced is running the dot org server and services, for which you personally fund the total costs. It seems that large hosting companies should share some of the costs to keep the dot org servers running. I would think it would be a simpler ask to contribute X dollars per Y users towards this. Obviously the costs and numbers would need to be worked out. But this seems like a cleaner path towards funding/cost sharing.
I am not a lawyer, accountant, or tax attorney. I’m a trauma surgeon. But consider placing WordPress.org within the Foundation. This way contributions to the Foundation could be used to fund running the WordPress.org and these contributions would be tax deductible. It could potentially provide you and many others a tax deductible method of supporting WordPress monetarily. Again, I don’t have any special knowledge, this was simply an idea that I thought might make getting monetary contributions to running the servers we all depend upon provide an additional incentive to those contributing.
I don’t know if you’re amenable to donating WordPress.org to the Foundation, but if you are you might want to speak with your advisors to see if any parts of this are feasible.
I believe that anything that helps WordPress users or potentially brings in more users to WordPress is beneficial and should be both acknowledged and lauded as contributions.
Update from X
I tried but the IRS didn’t approve WordPress code or .org as valid activities for the Foundation. That’s why it took several years to get the Foundation set up.
— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) September 29, 2024