Joost De Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, announced that he is stepping away from FAIR, a Linux Foundation project for creating an independent repository of themes and plugins.
Fair Project
The FAIR project was launched in mid-2025 in response to the Matt Mullenweg replaced WP Engine’s Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin in the official repository with his own version (called a fork, when a duplicate is created). Mullenweg also locked out WP Engine and many of its customers from accessing the official WordPress.org theme and plugin repository and related update services.
Mullenweg’s actions drew significant criticism and brought attention to the fact that the WordPress ecosystem had a single point of failure, leading to a movement to decentralize the plugin and theme repository by the creation of a federated group of independent hosted repositories.
This led to the creation of the FAIR project. Joost de Valk played a central role in describing why the community needed independent repositories and helped to co-found the project, helping to get it off the ground and into the hands of a neutral governance model.
Joost de Valk Steps Away From FAIR
Today, de Valk announced that he was stepping away from FAIR, citing the lack of financial support for the project as one of the reasons holding back the project from becoming a more viable entity.
He explained:
“In recent months, we’ve had many conversations with hosting companies and other large ecosystem players. What became increasingly clear is this: they do not want to invest in this kind of solution.
Not because they love the current situation. Not because they agree with everything that’s happened. But because investment means commitment. It means cost. It means stepping into political tension. And most of all, it means risk.”
Joost’s post mentions the “political tension” and “risk” that would arise from supporting FAIR but he doesn’t put a name to what that tension or risks are. But it’s fairly obvious that one of those tensions may allude to the reality that supporting FAIR could be seen as taking sides in the dispute between Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine. The stakes are high for web hosts, risking millions and even billions of dollars in earnings. So it may not be surprising that web hosts are not keen to support the FAIR project at this time.
FAIR Project Issues A Statement
The FAIR project acknowledged Joost’s decision to step away, affirming that funding has continued to be a problem. A post on FAIR stated that FAIR continues to function as an independent project, affirming that FAIR was never WordPress-specific but intended to be an industry-wide solution for software supply-chain security.
The blog post explained:
“The problems FAIR solves are not WordPress-specific. Supply chain security, decentralized distribution, trust and verification are industry-wide issues and they’re becoming more urgent, not less.
The EU’s Cyber Resilience Act arrives in December 2027 and when it does, software supply chain integrity becomes a regulatory requirement – demonstrating provenance, security scanning, and traceable update mechanisms. FAIR’s architecture is built with exactly this kind of trustworthiness in mind.
We haven’t given up on WordPress. We still welcome contributors and ecosystem leaders to join us so we can continue advancing the work.”
The FAIR project continues but it may be moving forward in a diminished state without a high-visibility spokesperson who is active in the WordPress community. But given the lack of hosting industry participation, it may be that FAIR will become more viable once the Mullenweg-WP Engine saga is wrapped up.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Mathias Elle
