- Matt Mullenweg welcomes EmDash’s competition, innovation and open source nature
- He sees it as an opportunity for Cloudflare to plug into its own services
- Mullenweg says it’s great, but it’s not a ‘spiritual sequel’
Automattic and WordPress.com CEO Matt Mullenweg have weighed in on Cloudflare’s launch of EmDash, rejecting the company’s claim that the new project is WordPress’ spiritual successor.
In a blog post, Mullenweg explains why EmDash is not the spiritual successor of the website builder, why EmDash has not solved the plug-in problem that it criticized WordPress for, and how security problems can be solved in the future.
“It’s all built on open source and web standards,” he claims. “You can run it anywhere; there’s no lock-in.”
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Mullenweg denies EmDash claims
Mullenweg explained that WordPress can run anywhere, from a Raspberry Pi or a smartphone to a low-cost server or across multiple hyperscaler data centers—it’s all the same code. On the flip side, 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.
All in all, in principle, he doesn’t have a bad word to say about EmDash or Cloudflare, but for interoperability and to avoid vendor lock-in, he notes that EmDash only runs optimally on Cloudflare.
As for the plug-in issue, Mullenweg explained that their unlimited power is a feature, not a bug, but AI could significantly improve their security in the next 18 months.
“I actually think the product is very solid, there’s some excellent engineering, migration tools, it’s 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 its open source. But if there is to be a spiritual successor, it would be “even more open.”
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