- Matt Mullenweg praises competition, innovation and open source nature of EmDash
- He sees this as an opportunity for Cloudflare to plug in its own services
- Mullenweg says it’s great, but it’s not a ‘spiritual successor’
Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and WordPress.com, 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 spiritual successor of the website builder, why EmDash has not fixed the plugin issue for which he criticized WordPress, and how security issues can be resolved in the future.
“Everything is built on open source and web standards,” he says. “You can run it anywhere; there’s no lock-in.”
Article continues below
Mullenweg rejects EmDash claims
Mullenweg explained that WordPress can run anywhere, from a Raspberry Pi or a smartphone to a cheap server or across 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 this post to praise Cloudflare, emphasizing the company’s status as a “premier engineering organization” supportive of open source.
Overall, he doesn’t have a bad word to say about EmDash or Cloudflare in principle, but for reasons of interoperability and avoiding vendor lock-in, he notes that EmDash only works optimally on Cloudflare.
As for the plug-in issue, Mullenweg explained that their unlimited power is a feature and not a flaw, but that artificial intelligence could significantly improve their security over the next 18 months.
“I actually think the product is very solid, there are great engineering and migration tools, it’s very fast, and the Astro integration is nice,” he concludes.
So while EmDash isn’t the spiritual successor to WordPress in Mullenweg’s eyes, he welcomes competition and maintains that it is open source. However, if there were to be a spiritual successor, he would be “even more open”.
Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form and receive regular updates from us on WhatsApp Also.
