Well, WordPress made it 20+ years without a huge fuss over the fact that everything was controlled by Matt. And it only happened now because Matt himself blew things up!
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.
> Well, WordPress made it 20+ years without a huge fuss over the fact that everything was controlled by Matt. And it only happened now because Matt himself blew things up!
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.
It also helps that at least one of those (GoDaddy) has one of the worst reputations for a tech company out there.
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.
I don't think the point of the article is that everything was intentional.
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 main point of this article is to explain Ghost's unique approach to open-source publishing software through its non-profit foundation model and its vision for democratic governance.
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.
> Operating as a profitable non-profit foundation with no owners, where all profits are reinvested into the project
Neither myself nor Hannah own any shares, assets, domains, trademarks, or other companies related to Ghost. Everything is owned by the Foundation.
our intention is to expand the seats on Ghost's board of trustees beyond myself and Hannah.
I don’t see how this is fundamentally different from the WP Foundation approach. It still depends on people who despite claiming an intention haven’t given up control.
Thanks. I wonder what the experience is like working on a very large codebase with or without a framework. E.g. Stripe vs Shopify.
Or if the framework is barely noticeable at that scale and doesn't really matter anymore. That's the impression I get for Instagram (which was built with Django).
Many writing systems of Southeast Asia borrowed this idea and work quite similarly as a result. Here's Burmese, which also writes vowels on all four sides of the consonant they follow:
ကာ - ka
ကီ - ki
ကူ - ku
ကေ - ke
ကို - ko
ကော - kaw
Side note: The Buddhist 'hamsa' in SE Asia derives from the 'hamsa' frequently mentioned in Ancient Indian texts. Oddly, it's not clear which bird the hamsa refers to, or if it even refered to different birds - perhaps a goose, perhaps a swan.
The Mute Swan overwinters in parts of North West India, and perhaps their range was more extensive in ancient times. This is the region where the Vedic corpus was written down, and in which the hamsa makes frequent appearances. In other parts of North India, the bar headed goose is more common. In ancient depictions of the hamsa in Southern India, it's more goose shaped. Ancient Buddhist murals from the Ajanta caves in Central India shows the hamsa as more swan like.
Some scholars have suggested that different references to the hamsa in the Vedic texts may refer to the goose in some places, and the swan at other places.
You think that /k/ sounds like /g/, because you speak a language (English) that doesn't distinguish them. However, I imagine that writing "k" for /k/ makes perfect sense to speakers of languages that have /g/, /k/, and /kh/.
And your solution works for /k/ and /kh/, but runs into problems when you have a three-way contrast (/b/p/ph/ and /d/t/th). You can't write "buu" for "crab" just because you think it sounds like an English "b"; you need "b" for the actual /b/ sound.
A romanization that’s good for writing an entire language accurately is usually not going to come up with spellings that lead an English speaker to a good initial approximation for exactly this reason.
I would argue that since food names are usually pronounced by non-speakers who will be unfamiliar with the romanization (or often don’t even know which language it’s coming from), the latter sort of transliteration is more useful. Egg foo young, not egg fuyung, egg furong, or daan fuyung.
Not sure what the issue would be here. I don't think it would be accurate to transliterate ปู as "buu" but instead "bpuu". Same with /d/t/th, as these can be written just fine like ใด - dai and ไต - dtai for instance. It can't capture everything, but it's impossible to anyhow because English doesn't have consonant classes like Thai does.
I just think that ไก่ is miles closer to Gai than Kai, that's all. Another hill would be that ปู is best written as bpuu/bpoo.
I don't really think it matters, no one is consistent, no transliteration covers all cases. Unless maybe ipa? (which no one uses to communicate anyway).
I can agree that the Paiboon romanization (g/k, b/bp/b, d/dt/t) is probably the most intuitive for English-speakers.
But it's silly to say that it's the best system just because it is easiest for people like yourself.
I do think something IPA-inspired (k/kh, b/p/ph, d/t/th) is consistent and still usable. It will also encourage better pronunciation (at least for somewhat serious students) if they are trying to say the correct sound (unaspirated /k/) instead of approximating it with an English phoneme that isn't used in Thai (voiced /g/).
I didn't say it is the best system though, I said that I think some characters are more accurate than others. The implied context being, casually writing Thai in English, to other English speakers.
But I do think that an intuitive system is better than an IPA inspired system, and that's purely because of the fact that only 1% of people will be using it and understanding it. The other 99% will be using other, random, variations. However an intuitive system will at least catch most people who speaks English.
Any romanization that is more than "close enough" is a waste of time though, when compared to simply learning to write in Thai.
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.