In February 2026, Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi explained why they were stepping away from efforts to bring FAIR into the WordPress ecosystem. FAIR aimed to give the software a neutral means of distribution, and they had made progress on the code. In their account, too few hosts had adopted it and too little money had followed to keep the effort going.
The businesses that depend on WordPress can agree that it needs to be run another way, admire the work toward that goal and keep using the old system. Agreeing costs little. Running a service costs money every month.
WordPress needs clear rules for how its shared services are run. It also needs businesses willing to pay to put those rules into practice. An industry that earns its living from WordPress cannot expect a few people to build and run an independent body in their spare time.
Open code does not settle project control
WordPress is an open-source software project. Automattic runs the WordPress.com hosting service. The WordPress Foundation has its own mission to keep the software freely available and support the community. Each has a different role. A change inside the company need not change who makes the rules for the project.
WordPress.org states that the software project belongs to no single company or person. Some people who work on it are paid by Automattic; many are not. The software’s GPL license gives people broad freedom to use, change and share it under the license’s terms.
Those freedoms make it possible to leave with the code, but anyone doing so still needs people and services to keep the software useful.
A code repository needs people to care for it. Someone has to run and secure the service that sends out software. People working on the project need someone who can explain rules and settle disputes. Trademarks have their own set of rights. A business deciding whether to rely on WordPress has questions that the software license alone cannot answer. Who can cut off access to a key service? What limits that power? What happens when the person using it also runs a rival business?
The right to build a rival service is worth having. Yet the cost of building one limits how much help it offers someone who needs it right now. An agency with client sites to maintain cannot replace years of shared work just because the license lets it make its own version.
Rachel Cherry made a useful distinction in her 2019 writing for the WordPress Governance Project. Governance did not require a vote on every feature or the removal of Matt Mullenweg. It meant having rules people could understand about who gets to decide. The initiative is now archived, but the point still matters. A project can keep a strong leader in charge of its code while putting some of that leader’s powers under rules they cannot change alone.
Volunteer labor has a limit
De Valk and Marucchi agreed with a point Mullenweg had made: businesses can profit from WordPress while giving too little back to keep it going. They disagreed with his approach, but saw the funding problem too.
Reformers will still have servers, salaries and unglamorous work to pay for. Taking work away from the group that does most of it does not make that work free. It can make the need for steady funding more urgent.
The usual response is to ask the community to help. Sometimes that means a business pays staff to maintain a service. Sometimes it means a volunteer takes on one more task after work. Both are giving something, but they differ in how much each person can afford to promise.
Reviewers need time to understand a dispute and explain their decision. They may have to stick with a dispute long after it has turned nasty. A body that relies on unpaid people to do that work may struggle to act on its own terms, however good its rules look on paper.
Volunteer work has value and limits. People should be free to help because the project matters to them. Their goodwill should not be treated as a fund that never runs out by businesses that would soon notice if the work stopped.
Funding also needs more than one generous donor. If one business pays for everything, people will doubt that the body can rule against it. Money from several sources does not ensure freedom from donors, but it gives that freedom a better chance. People should be able to see the funding terms and judge for themselves.
Which decisions need independent review
Mullenweg offers a serious objection to adding process. In an April 2026 post about individual contributions, he questioned whether committees and consensus had slowed work and whether pledged hours could obscure actual results. A project can have plenty of people involved and nobody whose job it is to finish the work.
More meetings cost time that people could spend on the project. Counting hours can reward those who look busy. A right to appeal every routine dispute about the code could become another way to stop work.
Review could focus on access to key shared services and leave routine feature work to the people doing it. Losing access can hurt someone’s business and stop them from keeping client sites up to date. A choice with those effects needs a named person in charge, published reasons and a way to appeal. Those affected should be able to understand what happened without piecing together a public fight from scattered posts.
When someone has a business stake in a dispute, they should step aside from ruling on it. Reviewers should be free to disagree with the person who made the first decision. These are rules I think WordPress should adopt, not claims about how it works now.
Security threats need room for swift action. A hearing before stopping an active threat would be foolish. The rules can allow staff to step in at once, then require reasons and an independent review. The service can respond to the threat while those affected still get a chance to challenge the decision.
The process should also have an end. An appeal without a deadline can leave someone in the same uncertainty as no appeal. The review body should state what it can decide, how long a review should take and what happens if it misses that deadline. People can then judge it by the cases it settles and the service it provides, not how many people show up to its meetings.
Who pays for shared infrastructure
Businesses that want these rules should be ready to pay for them. That includes businesses that disagree about WordPress leadership. They all need to know which rules apply to the services their products depend on.
Start with a budget that names the work and who will do it:
- What does it cost to maintain the service?
- What does it cost to provide an independent review route?
- Who keeps the records?
- Who takes over when a maintainer or reviewer leaves?
These questions are dull in the way that an insurance document is dull before something goes wrong.
A donor should help pay for a body everyone can rely on, with no right to special treatment. The funding terms need to make that clear. Large donors can have useful knowledge without being allowed to rule on their own disputes. Smaller groups need a say without being promised a veto over every change.
No charter can remove every conflict from a project of this size. Nor should people have to wait for perfect rules before they build with WordPress. We can ask for fewer big decisions based on who knows whom. We can ask to know who is in charge and where to go when we think they have misused their power.
The next proposal should arrive with more than the names of people willing to help. Beside each task should be the name of the body taking it on, a way to review its decisions and a budget to keep it working next year.
