Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO, stepped in last week to reverse core committers on a contentious change for WordPress 7.0. He directed the team to register Automattic’s Akismet anti-spam plugin on the new Connectors screen. This overruled a revert that had removed it days earlier. The move, detailed in The Repository , highlights deepening tensions over process, contributions, and Automattic’s role in the open-source project. A Trac ticket opened on April 1 by Automattic-sponsored committer Jorge Costa. It proposed adding Akismet as a default connector. Committed just 36 minutes later. No public discussion. Peter Wilson, a Fueled-sponsored core committer, filed a revert pull request the same day. He argued Akismet should use the standard plugin API for registration. Warned of potential duplicates on the screen. The revert landed April 5. But Mullenweg, as release lead, had the final say. “I did say that, and have changed my mind and we’re doing this,” he wrote on Trac ticket #65012 .…