I think what a lot of people are missing here isn’t the competition aspect, but the lack of giving back. GoDaddy, a company with more than 10,000 employee, contributes 217h a week to WordPress, that’s around 6 full time employees at best, or 0.06% of the company size. Automattic, a 2000 employee company, contributes 4098h a week, around 103 full-time employees, or 5.15% of the company size.

For a company the size of GoDaddy, this is a ridiculous number, smaller companies like 10up or Yoast outpace them in hours and percentage.

For WooCommerce, an open source project that GoDaddy makes millions from, they have 0 contributors, and 0 rev share of any kind. When GoDaddy acquired. SkyVerge, the biggest vendor on woocommerce.com marketplace, they immediately pulled back the whole catalog, taking that revshare that could be invested back into the project.

Automattic has more than a 125 person working full time on free and core features of WooCommerce like the core plugin, the admin area, the blocks, general marketing, integrations and such.

No other company contributes back to those goals and still benefit from them for free.

Sponsoring events is merely a marketing avenue to capture new customers, and I wouldn’t consider that genuine giving back, like full time sponsored contributors.

So while GoDaddy is giving back, it feels like it’s giving back less than the bare minimum. Once the funds and marketshare of WooCommerce shrinks, who would pick up its development exactly?

I absolutely have nothing against the people sponsored by GoDaddy, I worked with a lot of them, and they’re all absolutely great people who care a lot about WordPress, and I wouldn’t fault them for decisions made levels above them.