Second star to the right and straight on till morning…
Today, Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi announced that they are stepping away from their work on FAIR. We want to thank them publicly for their vision, energy, and willingness to take on hard problems that helped bring FAIR from a concept to a working technical reality in a remarkably short time.
We also want to be clear: FAIR isn’t stopping.
We understand and respect Joost and Karim’s decision. The challenges they faced: the reluctance of large ecosystem players to invest in neutral infrastructure, the misaligned incentives–these are real. We won’t pretend otherwise. But those challenges don’t define the entirety of what FAIR is or where it’s headed.
It’s a reality that FAIR hasn’t yet been able to secure the funding or board participation from the WordPress ecosystem needed to sustain the project at that scale. This fact doesn’t change the value or success of what has been built, even if it changes where we take it next.
FAIR’s work remains active under the Linux Foundation, which remains supportive of the project. We look forward to trying new approaches to solving these problems.
FAIR was never just about WordPress
FAIR is a federated package management protocol for the modern era, incorporating ideas from the likes of ATProto and established principles for software development. WordPress was the first reference implementation, and FAIR remains a working solution for that platform. But the architecture was always designed to be platform-agnostic. 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.
AI changes the math on trust
There’s a great amount of conversation right now about what AI means for CMS platforms and software development in general. AI-assisted development is producing code at a pace and volume unheard of. When anyone can generate a plugin, an extension, or an application in an afternoon, the question shifts from “can I find software?” to “can I trust it?”, or just “is this software even needed?”. FAIR’s trust scoring and verification layer is more relevant in today’s world, not less.
What’s next: TYPO3 and CloudFest
The open source CMS TYPO3 community and its technical leadership see the value in what FAIR is building. At the upcoming CloudFest Hackathon, we’ll be working together to bring FAIR’s federated distribution model to the TYPO3 extension ecosystem, building client-side integration, aggregator pipelines, and extending the protocol for TYPO3-specific distribution.
This is exactly the kind of cross-ecosystem adoption that validates FAIR’s design. In Europe especially, digital sovereignty and control over software supply chains are concerns driving real infrastructure decisions.
We recently published a roadmap for 2026, and the technical vision hasn’t changed. FAIR continues to address a genuine need for WordPress and other open source ecosystems. We released FAIR Connect 1.3 this week, with version 1.4 and TYPO3 support on the horizon. Without a formal board to wait on, the community has more room to move. Design, branding, and other project decisions can be made directly by the FAIR community. Watch for more progress in the coming months.
The work continues
We have a solid technical foundation, a working protocol, transparent governance with the stability of the Linux Foundation, and a growing community of contributors who believe in secure software distribution removed from single points of control. The road ahead involves deepening trust scoring, expanding ecosystem support, and continuing to build the tools that make FAIR practical for organizations managing real software at scale.
We are grateful to Joost and Karim for helping FAIR get here. We’re excited to see what’s next and we’re only getting started.
If you want to get involved, you’ll be welcomed – please join us!
