Ghost has been lucky that their own conflict of interest hasn't been an issue: The cofounders don't own anything, but they still have complete control on the nonprofit. It sounds like John O'Nolan is trying to take pre-emptive steps to prevent WordPress drama in Ghost.
I think most people in the community were willing to overlook Matt's previous petty, vindictive behaviour (e.g. Thesis, Wix, Pantheon, GoDaddy, Tumblr) since he's fairly charismatic in his writing, and was otherwise mostly benevolent.
I don't know if they still do it, but GoDaddy was notorious for just "early buying" domain names if you use their domain search engine (or any affiliated ones; it's why you really shouldn't search for domain names on random sites, GoDaddy controls a lot of domain search engines) to ensure you can't see if they're the cheapest option. Matt being upset with GoDaddy is easy to overlook because they're just plain awful already and it's a sort of "we don't agree with that in specific, but GoDaddy is a genuine problem so like, it's easy to overlook".
By contrast, WP Engine is just another general purpose hosting provider. I haven't found much evidence of them being particularly worse to their customers outside of their funding being a bad long-term choice. A lot of Matt's problems with WPE are well... Matt's problem and he can't seem to grasp that to everyone else, his smearing just makes him look like a petty dick.
But the whole point of this article is that it wasn't luck, it was intentional from the beginning...
He leads with the differentiators from WordPress because WordPress alternatives are a big conversation at the moment. This is a chance to inform people about how Ghost chose to be different: Non-profit, no plugins, etc.
But the final section ("Governance & the road ahead") seems like a subtle admission that the current Ghost structure wouldn't prevent a BDFL from going off of the rails. Maybe it's too subtle, since he doesn't explicitly connect statements like these:
> Neither myself nor Hannah own any shares, assets, domains, trademarks, or other companies related to Ghost. Everything is owned by the Foundation.
> From the beginning, Ghost's governance structure has had a board of trustees made up of its two founders, myself and Hannah.
I think Matt showed that some of the open-source-foundation shell game isn't real: There's a WordPress Foundation, and WordPress.org, but it really all belongs to Matt.
So, if Ghost can follow through on changing it's governance structure, it gains another differentiator from WordPress.
The author (Ghost's original co-founder) outlines how Ghost differentiates itself by:
- Operating as a profitable non-profit foundation with no owners, where all profits are reinvested into the project
- Maintaining independence from investors and commercial interests to better serve its community's needs
- Focusing exclusively on publishing workflows rather than trying to be an all-purpose platform
- Planning for sustainable long-term governance, by
- Intentionally limiting the organization to ~50 people
- Planning to expand its board of trustees beyond the founders
- Growing an ecosystem rather than a single large company
I emphasized the active, concrete verbs (actually gerunds fwiw) so that you may see how they are different than the passive verbs associated with 'luck' like hoping, wishing, praying, etc.
Author of the article here - that was exactly the point of the article.
