John O'Nolan describes how Ghost will avoid any WordPress-like drama

Following the weeks of drama plaguing WordPress, the CEO of Ghost, one of WordPress’s main competitors, has written a blog post on how they will avoid similar problems. 

The WordPress drama explained

WordPress is a content management system that is used by a whopping 43.6% of websites. WordPress itself is open-source, but to host your WordPress site, you need to either self-host it or use a plug-and-play provider. The most popular of these hosting providers are Automattic, which is run by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, and WP Engine. 

In September, Mullenweg wrote the blog post WP Engine is not WordPress in which he called WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress” for disabling the ability for users to see and track the revision history for every post, not contributing sufficiently to the open source project, and falsely using the WordPress brand.

Naturally, WP Engine was not pleased. They sent a cease and desist letter to Automattic basically accusing Mullenweg of attempting to extort WP Engine. 

This has since devolved into a tit-for-tat battle with insults, threats, bans, staffer resignations, and, ultimately, a huge loss of prestige for what has traditionally been a staple of the internet.

Background on Ghost

Ghost was founded in 2013 by John O’Nolan, a WordPress core contributor. O’Nolan loved the open-source ethos of WordPress, but became disenchanted by the “office politics, drama, and conflicts of interest” that seemed to constantly plague WordPress and frustrated by the bloat that accompanied WordPress’s pivot from pure blogging platform to general purpose content management system. 

So, he had the idea to build a pure publishing software that:

• Natively integrated the most important core functionality.

• Had a single permissive MIT license.

• Was structured as an independent non-profit organization.

• Had a simple and sustainable business model with official, managed hosting.

After being rejected by Y Combinator twice, O’Nolan raised $350,000 on Kickstarter, brought in Hannah Wolfe as co-founder and CTO, and launched Ghost by the end of 2013. 

Eleven months later, they were profitable, and today, they earn over $7.5M a year, employ over 30 people, and are completely self-sufficient.

More decentralization, less drama

Ghost’s business model is simple: they have the open source publishing software, and they have a hosting service. The revenue from the hosting service then funds the development of the open source project.

Considering that O’Nolan is the founder of both Ghost and Ghost(Pro), this looks an awful lot like Mullenweg’s arrangement with WordPress and Automattic. So, understandably, people are worried that Ghost could one day end up in the same situation as WordPress. 

To relieve these worries, O’Nolan has written the blog post “Democratising Publishing.”

The crux of O’Nolan’s argument is that Ghost is a non-profit open source project, which means it doesn’t have any owners who can personally take the profits. So, because it has no owners, neither O’Nolan or Wolfe own any shares, assets, domains, trademarks, or other companies related to Ghost, meaning there is no incentive for Ghost to “slash costs and drive up profits.”

As O’Nolan puts it, Ghost “exists for-purpose, rather than for-profit.”

However, that doesn’t mean O’Nolan is resting on his laurels. As Ghost expands, O’Nolan wants its governance model to evolve as well. So, as Ghost grows to O’Nolan’s final target of 50 employees, O’Nolan wants to expand the seats on the Board of Trustees beyond just himself and Wolfe. The goal here would be to have a wide range of perspectives that ensure Ghost remains accountable to its ecosystem.

In other words, O’Nolan wants to decentralize control of Ghost so that no one individual can steer the project in the wrong direction.

If they are successful in doing so, then, in theory, it would be impossible for the drama currently attacking WordPress to ever happen to Ghost.