I can't help but sense a level of arrogance when they launch their product by writing an obituary for a competitor. Is this what people feel when they make fun of the "(product here) killer"?

Cool idea, especially the plugin security angle, but WordPress’s real strength is its ecosystem. That’s going to be hard to replicate.

Security by reducing attack surface is underrated as a design philosophy. We took a similar approach for a PDF tool — moved processing client-side entirely so there's no server to compromise in the first place.

Isn't it kinda bad taste to call your thing a "spiritual successor" to something that is very much alive?

I'd usually expect this to be used about something like Google Reader, not something you are actively competing with.

The generous take is that this is someone's pet project that marketing got too excited about, and that the leadership haven't applied their minds to. GPL provides a moat for the community, who are contributing their time and energy into a project. It ensures that, even if a commercial company grabs your software, extends it, and commercializes it, that you can fold those improvements back into your original distribution. While the commercial entity benefits from your free labor, you benefit back from theirs.

Re-implementing WordPress (their words, not mine) as MIT licensed, while legally questionable, breaks that virtuous cycle and removes the community's moat. They've taken WordPress's roles and menus and borrowed its Gutenberg code (which is GPL), and launched it as an MIT licensed product, which breaks that virtuous cycle. It means e.g. a hosting company can take the product closed source if they want to, and never have to contribute any of what they build on top of the community's work, back to the community.

https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash/tree/main/packages/core... says "The core EmDash CMS package - an Astro-native, agent-portable reimplementation of WordPress."

Emdash uses WP's RBAC roles. Also uses their menus. Also depends on @wordpress/block-serialization-default-parser which I think might (??) be able to be used by an MIT project even though WordPress is GPL.

They used Claude Code it seems because the first commit has a CLAUDE.md file which became an AGENTS.md.

Who wants to vibe code an open source Cloudflare?

If you need a reliable source for WordPress plugins, check out https://github.com/fairpm/fair-plugin?tab=readme-ov-file#fai...

A system for using Federated and Independent Repositories in WordPress

It is written in typescript not php - so not a successor of WordPress. Typescript is a complete other Story. With compile step and build Pipeline. All not necessary in php

Do you think the Wordpress guy is going to have more public meltdowns on this post?

So it’s a WordPress successor that doesn’t support any WordPress plugins (since they’re written in PHP and this is written in TypeScript) and has baked-in support for blockchain payments. and also it’s “AI Native”, because the internet definitely needs more AI slop blogs.

This IS an April Fools joke, whether or not they intended it to be one.