Dear Nitin,

I respect your views – truly I do – as you say. Some will love it and some will hate it. The part that’s not *quite* ok, however, are the various attacks on my character and my motivations – which you’re totally jumping the gun on with false assumptions built upon false assumptions. I wish you’d sent me an email before writing this and I could’ve answered some of your questions 🙂

I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff I can’t change your mind on – but there are a couple of things I would at least like to try. First: Have you ever contributed to WordPress core? I’m genuinely interested – perhaps we share some experiences. I have. When you say I’m stealing from WP and giving nothing back, how exactly does that fit with the 2 years that I spent working (volunteering my time for free) for WordPress as the Deputy Head of The UI Group, and leading the biggest CSS refactor in the history of the codebase, as just one example?

I feel like I’ve given a lot to WP – and I love WP, contrary to what you seem to imply. If you’d read the followup to the original idea – you’ll see that I abandoned the idea of a “fork” after just 3 days, back in November. Why? Because I was talked out of it. Who by? My friends over at the WordPress core team. They’re much smarter than me, and explained how forking would be the worst of both worlds (lose compatibility, keep technical debt). So I listened to them.

The very first thing I tried was to build this as a WordPress admin plugin – and you know what? I couldn’t do it. Perhaps this is truly an incredibly hard task – I spent months looking into it. Perhaps my skills are inferior – should I apologise for that? I built Ghost with a couple of friend using technology which we know and can work with.

To the hosting issues I would pose you the question: How easy was it to host PHP/WordPress in 2003?

It’s not easy, you’re right. But that’s how technology advances. By doing things that aren’t easy. That’s something I’m really passionate about 🙂

Anyway. I shall end it here. I spent some time last night talking to Andrew Nacin about the potential to create a way for people to build a site with WordPress and connect it to a blog with Ghost – we both agreed that would be pretty cool if we could work out a good way of doing it.

You are completely entitled to hate – I just want you to know that I’m (hopefully) not as misguided as you initially thought.

Cheers

John