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Comment by notpushkin | Hacker News Reader

Contribute to the ecosystem they’re feeding off? (If they already do, they could claim so, but as far as I know they didn’t; and there are claims from WPE employees that they are even explicitly prohibited from contributing any open source code.)

Not that Matt’s behaviour is any better, but I do see his point here.

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I've seen conflicting claims made. Everything from "WPEngine gives nothing" to (in this thread) "WPEngine sponsors a dozen developers" [1]

I do not use either Wordpress nor WPEngine, so I don't have any stake in this nor insight into the dispute.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656542

> I've seen conflicting claims made. Everything from "WPEngine gives nothing" to (in this thread) "WPEngine sponsors a dozen developers" [1]

To at least partially back up my claim linked for the latter, WP Engine is part of WordPress.org's "Five for the Future" program, stating "This organization contributes 5% of their resources to the WordPress project" and listing developers they sponsor: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524210250/https://wordpress...

Their own open-source projects can be found on GitHub, like FaustJS: https://github.com/wpengine/faustjs

The primary events they sponsor are, to my understanding, WordCamps and DE{CODE}.

Thanks. Another counter-claim I've seen to this is that WPEngine used to provide developers and sponsor events, but no longer do.

Any insights there?

Not trying to come across as interrogating or particularly concerned with the answer, but the whole thing is a curiosity.

The "Five for the Future" page is still up. Wayback machine shows that the contributor/hours numbers seem to have been revised downwards last week, possibly suggesting that WP Engine contributes less than it used to (or that Matt noticed and decided to give it a more conservative estimate), but also meaning the figures there now should be up-to-date and that WP Engine does still currently sponsor at least 11 contributors.

WP Engine was listed as sponsor for WordCamp Europe 2024[0], which was in June, and ran DE{CODE} back in March. So they seem at least relatively recent on events.

[0]: https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/sponsor/wp-engine/

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond

Thanks! This is the first time I’ve seen a fleshed-out counter-claim like this. Yeah, if this is (still) correct I think I’m with WPE on this one.

(I also do not really have a stake in this, but as an open source developer trying to launch a product it’s really easy for me to sympathize with WP.org/.com)

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