Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ghost 3.0

ghost.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 119 posts

Re: Ghost 3.0

#81

Post by Aeolun »

nickjj wrote: post #8

Serious question. In the article it writes "all whilst operating as an independent non-profit organisation releasing open source software.". But this is right before talking about generating $5,000,000 in customer revenue and giving away 0% of the business. So when you're a non-profit, what happens with that $5,000,000 of business generated revenue? How much of a salary do you give yourself? Can you even give yoursel…

Just because it’s ‘not-for-profit’ does not mean the employees can live on air. That would definitely be nice, but in practice they still need to be paid a salary.

But all of the profits go right back into the company (e.g. no profit for the founders), which is a powerful thing.

Re: Ghost 3.0

#82

Post by dpeck »

Congratulations on the release. I like the direction that they're going and it feels like the only thing that it is missing to be able to replace the backend on a LOT of sites is being able to add some type of custom fields (simple key values) to posts. That combined with the subscription/membership they've added here would be an very powerful platform for many uses.

Re: Ghost 3.0

#83

Post by Aeolun »

akerl_ wrote: post #42
velcrovan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some Business 101 for you: Salaries are separate from profits. Salaries are a cost to the business just like rent and hosting costs. Profits come after all the costs. (Salaries are also taxed as personal income just like at any other business.) The $5m over 6 years is $833k in revenue per year. Not a lot, and salaries/benefits probably take up the biggest part of that, leaving very little profit. Which is the way it…

I feel like this comment would be totally complete without the first 5 words, which serve to make it condescending. Part of the goal of this community is for its participants to learn things they don’t know; the tone implied by the intro to your comment makes it seem offensive that somebody wouldn’t realize US non-profit status still allows for salaries and benefits for their staff. https://xkcd.com/1053/

I think that to a point this is caused by the attitude in OP’s own comments. While it would be nice if it was possible to completely ignore it, I don’t think that’s realistically possible.

Re: Ghost 3.0

#84

Post by LeoPanthera »

fortran77 wrote: post #76

Will the fans of Norton Ghost be complaining, the way the Elm MUA people complain about Elm the programming language? https://www.symantec-norton.com/Norton_Ghost_15.0_p115.aspx

I had to scroll down before I realised that this is not the disk imaging tool "Ghost".

I've been retired from IT for a few years now - is Ghost (the disk utility) no longer a thing?

I couldn't even guess how many hours I spent sitting in front of this screen: https://www.dmcinfo.com/Portals/0/vmware-norton-ghost.jpg

Re: Ghost 3.0

#85

Post by nickpsecurity »

mkr-hn wrote: post #65
johnonolan wrote: post #3

Hi HN, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the comments about 3.0 — we spent a lot of late nights on this, and it's a pretty big upgrade for Ghost as a platform (which is now 6 years old). I know the audience here is generally more interested in technical details and reasons for why this took longer than 1 weekend to build. So I'll share a few more relevant details absent from the marketing copy: - The new membership sy…

Do you have any plans to offer a solo professional type plan? ~$350/year and up is quite a lot more than I can justify for what I would use this for. Something like Automattic's Premium plan ($8/month) for a managed blog with a subscription system like this would be an easy sell for me. I understand if that's a hard no. You seem to be aiming at people who are or plan to be big time enough to hire people to help. Gett…

@ mkr-hn

On Lobsters (can't find thread), I mentioned that the price was too high for large amount of potential users, the code was open source, and low-margin providers could host it for the masses on the cheap. If wanting to be ethical, they could even send a percentage of the revenue and/or improvements back to Ghost.

I strongly encourage this model given dominance of sites such as Wordpress. Ghost can keep reaping the benefits of the premium market just publishing source. They can simultaneously stay profitable and democratize the tech through third parties.

Re: Ghost 3.0

#86

Post by nickpsecurity »

johnonolan wrote: post #3

Hi HN, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the comments about 3.0 — we spent a lot of late nights on this, and it's a pretty big upgrade for Ghost as a platform (which is now 6 years old). I know the audience here is generally more interested in technical details and reasons for why this took longer than 1 weekend to build. So I'll share a few more relevant details absent from the marketing copy: - The new membership sy…

I'm curious what Ghost thinks of my proposal here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21330114

I've promoted you in various places as one hell of a positive counter-example to how most companies work. Trying to be fair to Ghost in recommendations about getting more people using the technology.

Re: Ghost 3.0

#87

Post by kstrauser »

I dig Ghost, but there are any number of client apps (like MarsEdit) that play great with WordPress but not at all with Ghost. Are there plugins that let it support a more widely used API so that it works well with those clients?

Re: Ghost 3.0

#88

Post by fortran77 »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #84
fortran77 wrote: post #76

Will the fans of Norton Ghost be complaining, the way the Elm MUA people complain about Elm the programming language? https://www.symantec-norton.com/Norton_Ghost_15.0_p115.aspx

I had to scroll down before I realised that this is not the disk imaging tool "Ghost". I've been retired from IT for a few years now - is Ghost (the disk utility) no longer a thing? I couldn't even guess how many hours I spent sitting in front of this screen: https://www.dmcinfo.com/Portals/0/vmware-norton-ghost.jpg

Actually, its the first think I think of too.

Now I use Acronis True Image (which works very well on Windows and I can recover from a dead boot drive in no time!)

Re: Ghost 3.0

#89

Post by patrickthebold »

nickjj wrote: post #8

Serious question. In the article it writes "all whilst operating as an independent non-profit organisation releasing open source software.". But this is right before talking about generating $5,000,000 in customer revenue and giving away 0% of the business. So when you're a non-profit, what happens with that $5,000,000 of business generated revenue? How much of a salary do you give yourself? Can you even give yoursel…

Typically a for profit business has three main stakeholders: Customers, Employees, and Share Holders.

And they have to balance things like salaries, price of the product, dividends to share holders (though no one really pays dividends anymore, but that's beside the point.)

A non-profit skips the share holders, and is more like a direct exchange of cash for services better two parties, without a third party taking a cut.

Actually, usually there are taxes, so the government is going to take a cut.

So share holders kind of end up acting as a tax, a tax on not having capital, but instead of the money going to the government, it goes to people who happen to have capital.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Re: Ghost 3.0

#90

Post by disordinary »

Teichopsia wrote: post #71
johnonolan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a first version. We're certainly planning to add more payment options, including decentralised ones

Yes, but when? Stripe has been saying the same thing. They will support more countries, and yet, three years later they have yet to support many countries. Don't get me wrong, I understand that a country can not be supported magically. What I'm against are these comments that are written with (what I believe to be) the best intentions. But then it's posted, and the person who read it, years later is left with a bad t…

It's open source, there's nothing stopping you from integrating it with the payment platform of your choice and contributing the code back to the project.
Post reply on HN