UPDATE: After being reported as being “on hold,” GoDaddy sponsored contributor Mike Schroder clarified in the comments:
This is an active discussion, and the feature is not on hold.
Exactly what it’ll look like / what will ship in 6.1 is still being discussed, and the ticket is a great way to keep up to date!
I’m glad that we’re working towards consensus, and making the feature the best that it can be.
This is a good call, I think, but I can’t recall a story like at it at The Tavern where core contributors’ corporate sponsors/employers got named so much.
In this case it’s Google, which has an interest in propagating use of the WebP image format it created. It would be fair to also note Automattic as the employer of the core contributors putting a hold on WebP by default.
I think we’ll probably see more of this kind of thing, and it’s a good thing. Decisions are being proposed, argued, and decided in the open. Participants have been civil.
Say what you will about the heavyweights behind the code and decisions that go into WordPress core, it’s better to have them contributing than not contributing, and it’s good for them to have honest, open disagreements. This is open source at work.
On the other hand, it’s not great to see decisions made and reversed — and then reversed again — over an issue where prevailing opinion in the WordPress community has already formed a reasonable consensus.
Call it “decisions not defaults” —
