Ghost is a distributed non-profit foundation which gives away all of its intellectual property under a permissive MIT license. The company has no inve

Democratising publishing

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Style Pass

2024-10-30 15:00:06

Ghost is a distributed non-profit foundation which gives away all of its intellectual property under a permissive MIT license. The company has no investors and, in fact, no owners of any kind. I don't own any part of Ghost, and neither does my co-founder Hannah.

I had bought into the idea and the ideology of open source, but over time I'd become disenchanted by the office politics, drama, and conflicts of interest that constantly came to the forefront of conversations in the WP ecosystem.

Having seen how things worked on the inside for several years, the conclusion I personally came to was that WordPress and Automattic were not truly about democratising publishing, after all.

At the same time, I felt the product was becoming slow and bloated. WordPress was desperate to no longer be seen as "just a blogging platform" - and so it was adding features left, right, and center, to try and compete with Tumblr, Wix, Squarespace and Shopify. All at the same time.

I found myself constantly wondering: What could WordPress look like if the product, the technology and the organisation lived up to what I thought democratising publishing actually meant?