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June 16, 2004
6A Announces New MT License/Price
Six Apart has made some changes to the license and price of MovableType.
The license seems more clear, and the pricing is a lot more friendly: It will cost everyone on the puddingbowl.org server about $16 to cover a license adequate to our needs, and we'll have unlimited room to grow if more people decide to start a blog here.
My remaining concerns in practical terms:
- How well the MT developer community has survived the fracas that instigated the changes in the first place.
- How much more spiff MT3 will be for end users when the feature-laden version due out some time comes out.
I'm not going to spend any more time dwelling on the matter, nor am I going to round up a bunch of responses. The trackbacks to the link above ought to be adequate.
Meanwhile, (at first via Ed-over-IM then over a flood of hollering) there's the "Dave Winer pulls the plug on all those weblogs" scuffle, adequately launch-pointed by The Register. The audio response to Dave's audio statement (linked here) is sort of creepy and brittle. The funny/sad part is the shock and surprise that Dave's personal friends haven't been roughed up in this whole thing, and continue to have access to their blogs so they can broadcast pacifying messages. I guess it's the great karmic wheel at work: SixApart squares its deal just in time for Winer to foul his own.
Update: Ed's mourning his own weblogs.com loss, and I agree with Steve in the comments: Dave Winer and SixApart aren't laboring under the same obligations. No horse in the Dave Winer race, either, other than to watch the shitstorm play out.
Comments
Let's remember that Dave Winer is a person now, not running UserLand. He took responsibility for the sites, found out he was over his head and took steps to get things under control. While I don't agree with the steps, I know enough about the technical specifics to say that he wasn't left with a lot of options.
I'd avoid making statements that link Dave Winer and Six Apart in the same context. Six Apart is a real company trying to sell products and make money. Dave Winer is an unemployed technology innovator. Two different worlds entirely.
Posted by: Steve Kirks at June 16, 2004 8:09 AM
You're right, Steve, and I felt sort of snotty for saying it, but the "SixApart link fest" Dave kicked off during their licensing problems smelled like schadenfreude, and it's sort of hard to de-link the two now.
They're related, even when they're not related, if only because the sorts of people they honked off are overlapping so's to be indistinguishable.
Posted by: mph at June 16, 2004 8:15 AM