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.