“WordPress powers over 40% of the internet. It is a massive success that has enabled anyone to be a publisher, and created a global community of WordPress developers. But the WordPress open source project will be 24 years old this year,” the Cloudflare announcement said. “Hosting a website has changed dramatically during that time. When WordPress was born, AWS EC2 didn’t exist. In the intervening years, that task has gone from renting virtual private servers, to uploading a JavaScript bundle to a globally distributed network at virtually no cost. It’s time to upgrade the most popular CMS on the internet to take advantage of this change.”
More flexible licensing
Cloudflare’s statement also suggested that it is delivering open source in a way that is potentially more open and flexible than the WordPress approach.
“EmDash is fully open source, MIT licensed, and available on GitHub. While EmDash aims to be compatible with WordPress functionality, no WordPress code was used to create EmDash. That allows us to license the open source project under the more permissive MIT license. We hope that allows more developers to adapt, extend, and participate in EmDash’s development,” the company said. “EmDash is committed to building on what WordPress created: an open source publishing stack that anyone can install and use at little cost, while fixing the core problems that WordPress cannot solve.”
The next wave of web development
In an interview with Computerworld, Cloudflare senior product manager Matt Taylor said his team sees the project as the next wave of web development platforms.