Leaving WordPress.org: Here’s Why and What It Means for Paid Memberships Pro Users

WordPress.org is Matt Mullenweg’s personal website (source: the Automattic account on X.com). Matt is also the owner of our largest competitor, WooCommerce. The conflict of interest was always there, but in the weeks following WordCamp US 2024, Matt crossed several lines that make it crystal clear that he has no intentions of running WordPress.org as an open and fair platform.

Today, those same values have driven us to leave the WordPress.org plugin repository.

• We would not be supporting open source if we were to distribute our plugin from a site where Matt will lock out users for any reason or even take over complete plugins if it suits him.
• It would not be purposeful work to continue using the .org site or contribute to a WordPress project that could lock us out at any time or take over our plugins if it suits the one person in control of it all.