John O'Nolan is the founder of Ghost and writes about open source publishing, non-profit structure, and the history of the project.
HN commenters discuss Ghost's origins as a WordPress alternative, its YC rejection and non-profit structure, and some feel its original vision drifted.
I signed up for an account today. They don't give much away on their homepage, so here's a preview of the current post editor for those interested:
http://d.pr/i/189H
You can sign up today for $5 and you won't be billed again until they're out of beta. I felt it was worth doing because I support their vision and I'm keen to see how it develops, even though the actual product is very bare bones at the moment. (e.g. No template editing, no pages, can't save posts as drafts.)
What they have so far seems fast, clean, and easy to use, though. The environment is refreshing compared to WordPress and more suited to medium-to-longform writing than tumblr.
My advice to the creators: show actual mockups of what you're hoping to build. (e.g. http://john.onolan.org/ghost/ )
Promising never to sell out is great, but I would much rather see a visual pledge in the form of, "This is what we plan to make [screenshots] and this is the order we're building those features." Even if you don't offer a definitive schedule, at least your beta backers will feel more invested in the journey you're on.
When I came across the [Ghost](http://john.onolan.org/ghost/) while reading HN I really liked it, and have thought about making something similar, but have never gotten around to it. In the last few days though I have put it together just as John described (I don’t know if its legal or morally right to publish it, but I will blog about it at least because I have spent some time on it.
I finished working on the fifth image down in his post, -the post list and preview- I also finished the sixth image, which is the editor with markdown, and preview.
Now I am working on the backend which is created with PHP and the Slim PHP RESTful application framework. If you would like to check out the current version of my rendering of Ghost, you can see it on GitHub by following the link.
What strikes me about Ghost's story is that if they hadn't failed to get in to YC[0], they probably would have failed for real, because eventually the VCs would have come calling and they're obviously not a unicorn.
Instead, they have a successful organization providing a livelihood for almost 50 people, and real value to countless more.
[0]: https://john.onolan.org/a-decade-after-being-rejected-by-yc/
Very interesting ideas here, for me particulary in the "free as in Mozilla, not as in Automattic" angle. Some might consider it blasphemy to say Auttomattic and WordPress have divergent goals so I'm glad people are having the discussion.
All that said, I'm not sure I want a CMS from someone who uses images for text instead of actual text
http://john.onolan.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/81.png
I thought I'd mention that this is the release for Kickstarter backers only right now. Unfortunately, I didn't find out about this project until after the KS so I am out of luck for a few weeks.
If you don't know what Ghost is, I suggest you take a look at John O'Nolan's post from a while back that precipitated Ghost: http://john.onolan.org/ghost
We pay full corporation taxes and receive no tax benefits of any kind.
As mentioned several times in this thread, our company is based in Singapore, not the US. The structures, laws and taxes are not equivalent.
I wrote a post about this a while back here: https://john.onolan.org/what-it-means-to-be-non-profit/