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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, it does seem like it'd be nice if Substack had signed a support/integration deal with the Ghost team. That way Ghost could have gotten paid something for their hard work, and Substack could have avoided critical mistakes like the CDN security issue.

On the other hand, this seems like what success looks like for an MIT licensed project. A big company using the code to power their product without even having to contact, let alone ask permission of, anyone.

It seems to feel different for end-user applications like Ghost. But it's not actually any different than if they had powered Substack with SQLite or Postgres.

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> But it's not actually any different than if they had powered Substack with SQLite or Postgres.

I disagree. It's more comprable to if they used WordPress instead of Ghost. The database is a few layers further down, whereas Ghost is basically 90% of the end product (not sure how much they've adapted, but looks like a lot from John's Tweet)

Well, it's a bit more complicated than that.

Substack is positioning themselves to their customers, which are journalists/authors, as a comprehensive alternative to having a normal job working at a newspaper or magazine. That seems to include high-touch customer support, an integrated business model with payments, a mailing list system, a distribution method, etc. It's more of a service than a piece of software.

Ghost actually seems to have jumped on Substack's bandwagon by trying to skew their blog software toward being a direct Substack alternative.

So Ghost seems to have adopted Substack's business model and Substack seems to have adopted some of their blog technology.

I don't think you understood the linked thread. The problem is not that they are using Ghost. The problem is they are not including the attribution required by the license.

I understood that criticism but don't think it's correct, as many others have pointed out. This is MIT licensed software running on a server. Substack is not redistributing software to end users, by any common definition.

As shown in the thread they are shipping Ghost's client side code to the browser. The attribution needs to be there.

Hey, Substack CTO here. We don't distribute Ghost's code at all and the only piece of code included is a client-side search library used by the third party theme. But that library is actually hotlinked and hosted on jsdelivr (via npm) with no modifications made to it what-so-ever. This includes the line at the top with the license link as Ghost originally built it

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