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Owner of WordPress.com automatic Another company has added to its suite of online content creation tools and services with the acquisition of Grammarly competitor Harper. Although it competes in the same space as the popular grammar checker used by many online writers, Harper’s tool is aimed at developers, is open source, and works to preserve privacy by processing its checks locally on your device, the company says.
The service, named after novelist Harper Lee, is currently available as a language server through WebAssembly, but Automattic says the plan, post-acquisition, is to integrate its capabilities across web hosting platform WordPress.com, e-commerce platform WooCommerce, and WordPress. Jetpack plugin, and others.
Automattic also claims that Harper delivers its grammar and linguistic suggestions in less than 20 milliseconds, which is less than 1% of the time it takes “a certain popular online grammar tool,” the company notes in a statement. advertisementa possible reference to Grammarly.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed but founder Harper will join the Automattic team where he will work to integrate the service across Automattic products.
The acquisition comes at a time when there has been a lot of unrest in the WordPress community over Automattic’s legal battle with WordPress hosting provider WP Engine. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg accused the provider of taking advantage of the open source WordPress project without contributing a sufficient amount of code or man hours. Additionally, he says WP Engine’s use of the “WP” trademark confuses consumers and requires the company to pay a portion of its revenue to license the WordPress trademark. The dispute led to 159 Automattic employees leaving the company in October, and the company later rolled out further plans for a severance package for anyone else who wanted to resign.
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