Matt Mullenweg thinks WordPress is in decline. He may be right (2 minute read)
WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg says the project is declining because its bureaucratic, consensus-driven development culture prevents innovation and produces mediocre results.
What: Matt Mullenweg publicly criticized WordPress's open source development process, arguing that requiring broad consensus and extensive discussions with dozens of people before releasing any feature has paralyzed the project's ability to innovate and led to self-inflicted decline.
Why it matters: This highlights a fundamental tension in open source governance between democratic participation and the ability to move quickly and take bold risks, a challenge affecting many major open source projects including Mozilla.
Takeaway: For developers working on open source projects, consider governance models that elect trusted decision-makers with clear authority rather than requiring consensus for every change, or adopt a platform approach where opinionated innovation happens in smaller projects built on top.
Deep dive
- Mullenweg argues WordPress has spent years damaging itself through overly rigid adherence to consensus-based decision-making, not through external competition
- The current release culture requires wide-ranging discussions involving dozens of people before shipping any feature, which he says produces "boring or mediocre crap"
- He points out that the biggest wins will necessarily be non-consensus ideas, so organizations must accept occasional failures or they'll never achieve major successes
- The article's author, Ben Werdmuller, agrees and draws parallels to Mozilla's similar bureaucratic struggles in recent years
- Werdmuller argues that contributions should be made quickly and product design should be opinionated rather than consensus-driven, as seeking consensus inherently limits innovation
- The proposed solution involves governance structures with elected decision-makers who can be voted out if they underperform, rather than requiring consensus on every individual change
- This approach differs from web standards bodies, where consensus is appropriate to prevent single-vendor domination of interoperability
- Dave Winer offers an alternative vision: WordPress should become more of a platform foundation, letting smaller teams build opinionated interfaces and innovations on top
- The platform approach would make WordPress an "ecosystem monolith" while enabling faster-moving entrepreneurial innovation at the edges
- The core tension is between democratic participation in open source and the practical need for software projects to innovate and move quickly to remain competitive
Decoder
- Iatrogenic: A medical term meaning harm caused by treatment itself; Mullenweg uses it to describe how WordPress's own processes are damaging the project
- Consensus-driven: A decision-making approach requiring broad agreement from many stakeholders before taking action, which can slow or prevent decisive changes
- Governance structures: The formal rules and processes that determine how decisions are made and who has authority in an organization or project
- Ecosystem monolith: A stable, foundational platform that provides core functionality while allowing diverse innovations to be built on top of it
Original article
Mullenweg says WordPress is killing itself by blindly following rules and ideals.