May 19, 2004
The Great Blogtercation of 2004 : More Quotes from the Blogosphere
by Liza Sabater
Cognitive Dissonance #1 : Open Code is NOT Open Source
Freedom 0 [dive into mark]
Movable Type has never been Free Software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation . It has never been open source software, as defined by the Open Source Initiative . Six Apart survived and thrived in the blogging community because Movable Type was free enough .Movable Type came with source code, so hack-minded individuals could add features like threaded comments or IP throttling. You werent free to redistribute complete versions of your hacked copy of Movable Type, but you could release patches, and that was free enough. It had a well-designed plug-in architecture, so it could be customized with a dizzying array of third-party plug-ins . You werent free to redistribute Movable Type with those plug-ins pre-installed, but you could install the plug-ins separately, and that was free enough.
Starting April 16, 2004
Throughout this, many of the most vocal complainers made it clear that payment for programs was not the problem. (Many had donated to the company already.) It was the specifics of the licensing scheme and the impression of "fairness" that was the problem. For some, it was just the specific price points chosen, not the fact that there was one. Movable Type was never a "pure" open source product, and had been charging for commercial use for a long time. Users who wanted only GPL or similar licensing with redistribution and other rights were not their audience.
Daring Fireball: Like a Lead Zeppelin
With open source software, users can put their faith in the licenses behind the software. If the developers do anything that takes the software in a direction you dont like, you can take the existing software, fork it, and continue development in the direction you want.With commercial software, users put their faith in the company behind the product.
gingerandjohn.com: MT 3.0, cost, price, and goodwill
But it's not about being cheap. It's about getting brought up short from a company lots of bloggers felt like they had a personal relationship with; a cold smack from the wet halibut of reality. And when those folks say, "that's it, I'm leaving, never again" it's because of the old saying, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice" (all together now, with feeling) "shame on me". MovableType was never open source, and a lot more people know that now. A lot more people realize what happens when they don't use open source; when they depend on the goodwill of a corporate entity.I have personal experience with this type of corporate goodwill. In 1998, my company decided to move to an object-oriented database technology for all its new software development. Being a Microsoft shop, we went with J++. Within two years, Microsoft ceased all development of its JVM. We went through a costly development effort to translate our J++ middle tier (with its Microsoft-specific libraries) to Sun Java, and made a commitment for "never again". But then came .NET and the coming end-of-life of VB6 (all our front ends are VB6 ). Our choices were to move towards a J2EE architecture for our products, or move to VB.NET and C#. Three different groups (in a company of about 40 developers), over a 12-month period, came to the same conclusion: J2EE is not only the best from a technology standpoint, but from a flexibility standpoint. Six years later we're still transitioning, but it's happening, and when VB6 is EOL' d, we won't be dependent on Microsoft products any more.
Cognitive Dissonance #2 : Customer or Community?
Customer or Community?
The weekend action has all been about Moveable Type and the new 3.0 developer release . After reviewing the reaction, my thinking is that Six Apart misjudged their user base. They thought that existing users were customers, while their existing users thought they were a community. The new licensing is all business and the community feels left out in the cold.The Blog Herald: Friends don't let friends do MT 3: looks like MT 3 sucks as well as costs too much
The whole episode is shaping up as a text book case of bad marketing and the potential decline of SixApart will surely be recorded in books. Ben and Mena Trott owe much of their success to the great word of mouth and free advertising they received from bloggers world wide over several years based on a FREE Movable Type. They received the same support when they launched the hosted and paid version TypePad as most respected their need to make money. But now by shafting the very people who made them they will suffer the consequences.
American Digest: Movable Type to Users: Bend Over and Cough It Up
SMILING MENA TROTT'S little note about their new "engulf and devour" pricing scheme -- and "scheme" is the right word for it -- has caused no little consternation in the blogsphere. Well, 'consternation' is a little soft -- 'rage' and 'betrayal' and 'greed' are also mentioned in some of the 450+ trackbacks.Indeed, Mena's little note has probably set a new trackback record for a single post in all of the blogs that use Movable Type. Written in the sweet, dulcet tones that we have come to know as "pure Mena" this little note is not the first time SixApart has proved to be hamhanded in dealing with its large userbase.
Mena's Corner: It's About Time Ben and I are incredibly proud to see that Movable Type, the product that we first developed in our spare bedroom, has now enabled us to become a company that not only allows good people to have jobs that they (hopefully) enjoy but also a company that remembers those who got us here.Translation: "We'd like to thank all the little people."
..:: Ants4pets ::..
And though I do agree with Jason , that a better pricing structure for personal users is in order, yesterdays news has really left me sour with Six Apart as a company. Ants4pets.com doesn't make a single profit in maintaining this website nor do we charge people an hourly rate to view the photography (think bandwidth) displayed here. In actuality, we end up losing money every year on this project because hosting costs (about $2,000+ a year) and domain renewals for three websites are expensive. Like most companies, I understand the desire to make profit, or cover the basic hosting costs incurred from the MT product. However, last time I checked making a profit where other developers and beta testers have done the work for you free of charge is unethical. And not something I will stand here, on my soap box, and support.IrishEyes: MT's eroding social capital
RYZE -- The most-visited space in my blogroll is Mena's corner of the Web kept fresh by the leading developers of Movable Type and the "strangely addictive" ( Leader Pascal's words ) trackbacks of the past week. Ben and Mena Trott earned their prominence through hard work and social capital in the form of community acclamation. But as events of this past week have shown, they've lost a lot of social capital with one simple announcement. They set a price point for playing in their part of the Weblog community and that pricing has annoyed thousands of people. What might be required for the sake of venture capital can erode significant levels of social capital.mesozoic.geecs.org/cogito: And the crowd goes wild
While I wish Mena and Ben the best of luck in their business, if I were in their shoes, I would've done things a lot differently. Part of the reason MT is such a good development platform is because it has a wide user base and a very large community of plugin developers. Many of the people in this community cannot (or are simply unwilling to) pay high fees for software which is heavily commoditized. There are dozens of blogging systems out there, and some (like WordPress ) are actively courting MT users. Converting from one system to another is easy enough; Mark Pilgrim has already done it , and his site was one of the most complex MT installations I've seen.I suppose the folks at Six Apart figured they could ignore this "middle band" of their user community, keeping only the very hard-core developers on MT and the very lightweight users on MT Free or TypePad. My own belief is that the people who can no longer justifiably use MT 3.0 are actually the ones who did most of the active development of MT plugins and extensions, and that cutting these folks off is tantamount to suicide by stagnation. ( Many other bloggers agree.) Time will tell; I'd like to think Six Apart did research before landing on this specific licensing scheme, and that they have a clear view of where their business is headed. But that's not always a given.
As for me, I'm part of the "middle band" that Six Apart has thumbed its nose at. I run my own web server, I need my own installation (not some blogs.com subdomain) and I need flexibility as well. Yet I can't justify spending hundreds of dollars for MT 3.0 when there are so many equally powerful alternatives , available for free — not free as in beer, but free as in speech .
On a path: MovableType 3
The only thing that I can figure is that Six Apart really isn't interested in being the blog software of choice for individual bloggers anymore because they don't want to be in the business of individual blogs unless they are TypePad blogs. From my perspective it looks like they want MT to be the Content Management System of choice for businesses. I say this not only because of the crazy, crazy pricing scheme but also because of the way they're pointing out that part of the crazy expensiveness of licenses is due to the fact they Six Apart will now be offering support to people who have purchased licenses. One of the great things about MT was the community support aspect of it. We helped each other. It really created a community feeling. I've been watching that feeling evaporate ever since paid support people have been present in the forums. The ladies themselves are great and have been offering terrific support since the earliest days of MT. But as soon as they became paid staff I noticed a real change in what was and wasn't acceptable around the forums. Meaning that before the forums were a safe place for newbies to ask questions about HTML or CSS along with their MT questions and 9 times out of 10 someone would help them out. The question may not have been directly related to MT but it was indirectly in that it was HTML for the MT blogs. Now more and more anything that isn't directly related to MT is given the "this isn't an MT issue so it's not appropriate here" message. Maybe I'm only but I think that just sucks. It sucks and it indicates to me that the MT community is a thing of the past.
Cognitive Dissonance #3 : Kicking the baby squirrel
Burningbird >> Never Kick a Sleeping Giant
Mistakes in licenses are serious things. Folks are right to question these. People who plan on using Movable Type in the future should continue to question confusing language in the licenses.What’s sad about this though, is that the ‘baby squirrel’ phenomena is still in effect for Movable Type and the Trotts and Six Apart, when I thought we’d grown beyond that.
What do I mean by the ‘kicking the baby squirrel’ phenomena? When we address technical issues or question pricing, and you perceive it as an attack on the people, that’s accusing us of kicking the baby squirrels. If you perceive any criticism of a company or a technology or a person’s writing or opinions, as an act of overt hostility, and respond with personal insults in return, that’s playing the kicking the baby squirrel card.
I hope those of us moving to other tools, don’t bring this “can’t kick the baby squirrels” phenomena along with us–I’d hate to see a weblogging tool like Wordpress reverenced by a league of obsessed followers. I’d have to move tools, again, then.
MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: Six Apart quells the fury
On a more personal note, I must say this: Six Apart is not evil. They are people, just like you and I. What's more, they are webloggers, just like you and I. Some of them have worked tirelessly on behalf of this community to make it a better place. They want to thrill and delight Movable Type users and at the same time establish a lasting business that will do so for some time to come.They certainly didn't deserve the kind of vitriolic anger and disparaging remarks levelled at them yesterday. It makes me sad to see people throw two and a half years of dedication out the window because of two pages on the internet.
tima thinking outloud > Closure on the MT3 Licensing Fury.
I think these changes are more then reasonable and address many, not all, users concerns. There are still many who only want to pay $20 or want unlimited licenses. I don't think that is reasonable though. You can't run a business on that – you can barely eat as a software developer on that. These comments are the ones that I found so disheartneing, and now over time insulting, that I posted in the first place . It illustrates a serious lack of appreciation for how much time, talent and skill goes into a piece of software. Or in MT's situation how much it does transparently to make a users expierence so great.And yes it is about eating Mark . Not everyone gets a regular pay check to bankroll their million dollar code projects. I don't begrudge anyone who wants to use free software or develop it. (Why would I? I do both.) But I don't think its fair to pounce on them for not doing so. Conversation is fine and freedom is great, but it doesn't mean we all have free license to say rude and hurtful things with impunity – especially to people you claim to like.
GlennLog: Movable Type's Movable Feast
So while the Trotts and Six Apart are being hacked to death, they're not a company that insulates themselves from these attacks and critiques; rather, the criticism is co-incident in Web space with the statements being referenced. This is an extraordinary development in business history.
Posted by Liza Sabater in Blogs, Commerce, Culture, Open Source, Public Relations, Social Networks, Technology, Web
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