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by lupu 76 days ago
So this product has nothing to do with wordpress, it's just another CMS that mentioned WP only bcz they created a migration plugin that won't work on 90% of existing wp sites and won't work on 100% of woocommerce sites.

This is no successor, it's not even in the same universe. - vendor lock-in, losing gpl, losing access to plugins source code, loosing ownership.

3 comments

So it's spiritual successor, not successor.
It doesn't feel connected in spirit at all though. It is in the same category of app though. So there is that. Categorical descendant I'd say.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mullenweg-to-cloudflare-...

Here what Matt said: "The closest thing I’ve seen to a spiritual successor isn’t another CMS, it’s been OpenClaw.”

He's saying "the spiritual successor to WordPress won't be a CMS at all, it'll be something in a different category entirely. Or he lets his emotion get better of him.

Correct, "categorical descendant" is actually more precise given how differently they were built.
It's licensed under MIT. It's more permissive than wordpress.
That is not a pure upgrade, GPL may well be the "better" / safer / trusted /... option for some
You're welcome to take an MIT-licensed project, fork it, and relicense it as GPL. The inverse? not so much.

Hard to sell it as anything but an upgrade if you care about open source.

The thread here doesn't explain why GPL might be better. So I'll try.

You're correct, with MIT there are a lot less restrictions. I can make GPL or pretty much any other license. Including one that I sell and never have to release the source of.

The latter option means if you make a product off of it, you have no obligation to share or even fund upstream development. This kind of situation has strangled other products.

Consider if Linux was released under MIT. Then companies like Oracle and RedHat (now owned by IBM) who have strong incentives to keep improvements to themselves and fund a lot of development would never share those improvements. Linux is the most used operating system in the world because of _everyone_ contributing back. But a MBA would want to privitize the profits.

If you care about the long term openness of a product, then GPL is hard to beat.

> Hard to sell it as anything but an upgrade if you care about open source.

Quite the opposite. We care about these freedoms enough that we want everyone to enjoy them. We don't want a third party to take this work and use it to lock more people into their proprietary software.

The ideological split likely comes from whether you care more about developers having the freedom to do whatever they want, or do you care about users having access to software which works the way they want it to.

> You're welcome to take an MIT-licensed project, fork it, and relicense it as GPL.

No you can't. MIT requires attribution.

"more permissive" = plugins shipping compiled bundles and not the source code.
yeah it's strange, if you are building a CMS in AI times, I think you would want an llm integration first. Not a UX clone of WordPress. The UX of WP is sort of a historical clutch not a plus.
I'd go the other way. Have less stuff. Just a text box, markdown, insane support for mermaid and everything. Dump the "blocks" of wordpress etc. Too confusing and fiddly. Maybe have AI assist to help with styling the rendered page a bit.
yeah same, but hn is AIfobic, so gets downvoted. So many cool stuff is now possible, LLM with integrated review features etc.