05.15The Brouhaha
I wasn’t going to throw my two cents into the pool about the whole Six Apart Movable Type debacle, since nobody knows who I am, and nobody really has a reason to care. This whole thing is a really interesting study in the temperament of the blogosphere, though, and will probably be an important footnote for anyone who ever tries to take a product they’ve positioned as ‘free’ and make it profitable. It’s especially important for folks who get into the guts, but I’ll get into that later.
Six Apart is back-peddling, and I’m sure Ben, Mina and Joi The Nuns of Saint Archangel buy
have been having some very interesting conversations over the last two days, especially if you happened to be a fly on the wall for the conversations that happened in the weeks and months before. In my opinion, they’re not back-peddling very hard. They’re back-peddling like a realtor negotiates. They’re testing the waters with a ‘well, how about if you have a $10 add-on for every blog and user?’ option.
Personally, I think the damage has already been done. It’s a bit like Netscape charging for Navigator, back in the dark ages. We all knew that they couldn’t make any money giving away the browser, and we all also knew they had to make money somehow, but we also knew in our guts that we shouldn’t have to pay for the browser. If Netscape had gone draconian on licensing terms and started demanding money, Microsoft would have had an even easier time. Granted, a lot of companies paid for Netscape, including one I worked closely with, and Netscape made a lot of money selling them servers and whatnot, but I don’t know any end users, in my entire experience working in the ISP field, who actually bought a copy.
I’ve bought plenty of software over the years. I’ve bought several copies of BBEdit, because it’s great software, and because I use it to make money. Same with Office
, same with Eudora, same with Transmit. They’re indispensable tools that I couldn’t make my living without. Personal blogging, on the other hand, isn’t something that’s profitable for 99.9% of the people who do it. Wired might pay Bruce to blog about bionic cockroaches sent by DARPA to spy on Russian mobsters, but they’re not going to pay you to write about some cute thing your cat did this morning.
This blog used to be based on Movable Type. It’s now based on WordPress. Back on September 9′th of 2000 I started a previous version of this blog with a perl script I wrote from scratch. Eventually the blog craze really hit and Jon
was all hot to trot about Movable Type. I can’t remember the exact details of the conversations we had about it, but I do remember being very leery about investing time and energy into something that wasn’t open source. Yesterday that leeriness paid off.
Now, I’m a geek. If I use your product, and I’m allowed to, I’ll probably at some point or another start jacking with it. If you’re really good, and you’re free, you may end up like MySQL
, and become a de-facto industry standard. I heard some statistic somewhere that Six Apart was only making $.50 for each copy of Movable Type downloaded. I don’t see how that’s a problem, though. The bandwidth I’m taking up certainly doesn’t cost $.50. I never asked for support, and I’ve evangelized the product to other folks. If we’d come into a business, and their needs would obviously best be filled by Movable Type, then we would have had them buy a copy and all would be swell.
Now there’s no real incentive for me to invest my time learning Movable Type. Before it was a de-facto standard. It’s what everybody was using. Now it’s only suitable for those with cash to spend, and no guarantee of the costs of future upgrades or what have you. I’m much better served investing my time becoming familiar with an open source project, or even donating some time to it, since I know that I won’t get burned in the future.
Which brings me to WordPress, which this site is now running. I’m mainly a perl programmer, born and bred. I like to do things quick and dirty and move on to the next problem, but even I realize that PHP and MySQL are the way to go when you’re building a dynamic web app. It always bugged me that Movable Type needed to re-generate everything every time I made a change, but now I can edit a template on the disk and it all happens auto-magically. The way it should be.
Maybe someday soon I’ll donate a bit to WordPress, to thank them for their fine product. Maybe when I switch Irma over I’ll do it. But it certainly makes me feel better knowing that I don’t have to, and nobody’s going to change the pricing on me or kill the product.
Addendum
I suppose another good analogy for this would be when Apple announced they were going to charge for .mac. People were pissed, in general. Some people said ‘but it costs money to run’ and they were right. Some people said ‘but it used to be free’ and they were right. In the end, they lost a ton of customers but it became profitable. I guess Six Apart’s doing the same thing. Me? I don’t have a .mac account anymore.
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