Automattic announced today that a team inside the company will be adopting Alex Mills‘ plugins and continuing their development and support. Mills, also known around the web as @Viper007Bond, was a WordPress core contributor and prolific plugin developer who passed away in February 2019 after a battle with Leukemia.

At one time last year, Mills was the primary author for and contributor to more than 40 plugins hosted on WordPress.org. The current collectionseems to have been pared back to 17 of his most popular plugins. According to stats from WP Tally, these 17 plugins have a cumulative download count of 138,665,603 and a cumulative rating of 4.55 out of 5 stars.

“Since all of my plugins are open-source, they are free to be forked by reputable authors in the WordPress community. It would mean a lot to have my legacy go on,” Mills said in his farewell post earlier this year. The plugins are all free without any pro versions or monetization efforts attached to them.