- Matt Mullenweg welcomes the competition, innovation and open source nature of EmDash
- He sees it as an opportunity for Cloudflare to connect its own services.
- Mullenweg says he’s great, but he’s not a “spiritual successor”
Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and WordPress.com, has weighed in on Cloudflare’s launch of EmDash, rejecting the company’s claim that the new project is the spiritual successor to WordPress.
In a blog post, Mullenweg explains why EmDash is not the website builder’s spiritual successor, why EmDash hasn’t resolved the plugin issue it criticized WordPress for, and how security issues can be fixed in the future.
“Everything is built on open source and web standards,” he says. “You can run it anywhere; there’s no lock-in.”
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Mullenweg rejects EmDash claims
Mullenweg explained that WordPress can run anywhere, from a Raspberry Pi or a smartphone to a cheap server or in multiple hyperscaler data centers – it’s all the same code. On the other hand, he sees EmDash as an opportunity to sell Cloudflare services.
Mullenweg uses the post to praise Cloudflare, noting the company’s status as a “top engineering organization” that is pro-open source.
Overall, I have nothing bad to say about EmDash or Cloudflare in principle; However, for interoperability and to avoid vendor lock-in, he notes that EmDash only runs optimally on Cloudflare.
Regarding the issue of plugins, Mullenweg explained that their unlimited power is a feature, not a flaw, but artificial intelligence could significantly improve their security in the next 18 months.
“In fact, I think the product is very solid, it has excellent engineering and migration tools, it is very fast and the Astro integration is good,” he concludes.
So while EmDash isn’t the spiritual successor to WordPress in Mullenweg’s eyes, he welcomes the competition and supports it being open source. However, if there were a spiritual successor, it would be “even more open.”
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