Profit is Good

Amen. I've bumped into the "anyone trying to make a profit is a sinister shark" types in the event organization world. More intimate, non-profit community events provide a totally different experience to large, commercial events, yet there are people who would irrationally love to wipe out the latter rather than live and let live.

Doing things for profit is certainly not the only (or even best) way but it's a perfectly legitimate approach that can be done honestly and with integrity, and not one worth dismissing out of hand even if it doesn't fit into your worldview.

Kickstarter projects are not allowed to be turned into for-profit companies, even though KS themselves broke their own rules in this by turning a blind eye for Penny Arcade.

If they want to turn Ghost into a for-profit company and not a non-profit organization, they can follow in Wordpress’s footsteps exactly: create an open source, non-profit blogging platform, then later create a separate entity (a for-profit company) to offer additional services for money.

But that’s assuming that is their goal. Who’s to say their goal isn’t simply to create a much better blogging experience than Wordpress for the same reason Wordpress was created in the first place (to offer a much better blogging experience than existed at the time)?

I’m all for companies having a business model and focusing on both quality and profit, but that does not preclude the valuable existence of non-profit organizations and open source projects, like jQuery or my own project, Modernizr.

I think a better use of time would be to criticize the obviously for-profit startups that obviously have no business model than an exit strategy of hoping to eventually sell, or get enough users and investment capital to grow to the point where ads become viable.