the buyout.

[verbminx]

I think the news that Six Apart has bought LJ

absolutely sucks.

I don't trust Six Apart as far as I can throw them.
I'm a Movable Type user and have been for two years.
After the licensing thing and their blatant profiteering (does anyone stop to think about WHY they want to "grow their business"?) I don't think that this will mean anything good for LJ in the long run. It's not really the issue of what SA will do to LJ - probably not much bad, and maybe a lot of good - it's that as their ambitions grow, so does the possibility of them eventually:

- being bought out
- crashing and burning
- choosing to sell off parts of their business portfolio
(IE, Brad can control who he sells LJ to, but he can't control who THEY sell LJ to several years down the road.)

This just stinks of stuff like... how ChickClick got completely ruined. They started small and indie, got ambitious, got bought out (I think) twice, got taken offline by their ultimate owners. I can't remember whether it was the people the founders sold out to who ended up taking the network down, or if those people sold it to snowball.com, who took it down. Whatever. The point was that an interesting and vibrant community - originally a network of zines and relatively early blogs - was progressively made more corporate and then killed by crappy profiteering by supposedly indie-friendly owners, once the original owners sold out.

Comments

[anotheryourself.livejournal.com]

i've been reading some pretty positive thoughts on the buyout, but i think you described the uneasy feeiling in my stomach pretty well.

[keever.livejournal.com]

Ditto. I'm definitely concerned, too.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

best. icon. ever.

really. from both of you!

thanks for the nice words. i wanted to be able to put my Cassandra-type feelings into words, about exactly WHY SA's purchase of LJ made me uneasy.

[miabella.livejournal.com]

speaking of which, try as i might to figure out what movable type is... i can't even figure out how much it costs... or anything else about it for that matter. what do you use it for, if i might ask?

movable type and six apart

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

MT is PERL-based blogging/publishing software that you install on your own server. It publishes a blog basically wherever you want it. It doesn't really cost anything if you strictly limit the number of blogs and users you have. Basically - it's free if you want to use it to write one blog yourself (actually up to three blogs). But as soon as you want to add another user, you're in it for at least about $70. Then the prices increase (I think there are three or four levels) based on the number of different blogs you want to create with a given installation, and the number of users. This is fair enough when you consider that (this is their given example) law firms and so on were using MT installations to allow members of a group of lawyers working on a single case to tell everyone else working on the case where they'd gotten that day: IE, like a group email list, only in a static location on the web. But the introduction of the licensing structure meant that a lot of people (who already had to pay for web hosting, etc) who were just doing topical blogs with a few friends - like, say, the sewing blog that has around five people who post to it, or on a larger scale like BoingBoing.net - suddenly had to pay Six Apart almost a hundred dollars. (They could have continued to use older versions of MT, but those versions were not on offer anymore, and contained security flaws, and most 3rd party plugins that address those security flaws only work on the new, licensed version. There were older versions of these plugins, but a lot of the people who made them no longer distribute or support them.)

There was such an outcry from the blogging community when Six Apart introduced these licensing structures in May 2004 that they actually changed them so that people who just keep one or two blogs on their site don't have to pay and so that it's less expensive for the "group of pals having fun" scenario. Also, as far as I can remember, the licenses are good forever and do include upgrades in perpetuity... I could be wrong about that though. I have the feeling that they had to intro these pay structures to secure more funding... IE, investors wanted to see them trying to make more of a profit. They also have TypePad, which is like BlogSpot only using an MT-based system on their own servers. I do not personally like TypePad because I think it's kind of expensive for what it does. This is also probably because I already pay for LJ and webhosting and I really don't want to have to pay for too much more.

Oh, I use MT for any blogs hosted at starlust.org. Mainly my knitting blog (which I don't really do anymore) and the Props blog (which I am still in the process of moving over from BlogSpot and redesigning and stuff). I abandoned the idea of a group knitting blog when the licensing structures came out.

So... the Six Apart people are not by any stretch of the imagination "evil" like Microsoft or anything, but they ARE ambitious. They now have three offices, they're now multinational. I don't HATE them or anything - the contrary. But I don't entirely trust them, as they've shown their ability to piss off their customers with unpleasant surprises if it will make them money or at least be better business sense.

[anotheryourself.livejournal.com]

(pssst! i'm a big dork and just got sucked into your links on the left and now have way more rss feeds than anyone actually needs.)

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

... and I keep discovering new ones every day! Have you seen Preshrunk (http://preshrunk.info/) yet? It's genius! :D

[anotheryourself.livejournal.com]

hee! that's cool!

[purplecleo.livejournal.com]

I realize this is kind of a different situation than Napster was in but they were a company that had my respect. I liked that it was run by young innovative people, and LJ is/was one of those companies that happened to become very successful. In my opinion their success was due to a combination of things and especially because they didn't overextend themselves. And now, taking a more commercial route definitely increases the risk of that. People have been saying that in their experience merging like this is a good thing and while it certainly has been for some companies, I just don't think it was a good choice for LJ. Then again, I can't see the alternative being much more efficient so I will cross my fingers and work up backing up my journal.

::sigh:: It's kind of silly to think this but if LJ goes under I am going to be....really really heartbroken. It's unhealthy.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

Well said.
The Napster comparison, like you said, isn't completely appropriate, but it's understandable... Napster's problems started with their questionable legality, but it would never have been much of an issue (I don't think) if they hadn't started to try to find a way to make a profit. Actually, I think it's possible that the fact that they DID decide to be "a business" instead of just a connective network that started the whole filesharing war, and it may be John Fanning (Shawn's asshole uncle) who we have to blame for strict DRM.

This really reminds me most of the ChickClick fiasco - because when ChickClick got better funding they were able to offer free email, free website space, etc, and when Snowball.com got their hands on the site (mind you, in this scenario Snowball is not Six Apart, they are the analogues of the people Six Apart could eventually sell LJ to) - they introduced a shopping channel, much more commercialism. The site failed, as so many sites did in 2000-2001, and everyone lost their email, their sites, the message boards, etc etc. It was just a really icky thing to see happen - your favorite site getting taken over by people who actively want to wring a lot of money from it, and then put it through a slow death when it doesn't work.

[talentshow.livejournal.com]

you've pretty much summed up the issues I have with the buyout, much more articulately than I could have.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

thanks. i tried. i was really tired when i heard about it (like 9 or 10 PM when I'd been up since 5:30 AM) and it was hard for me to work out why it immediately struck me so negatively.

but these are just fears. they COULD be unfounded. Six Apart are not bad people, but they aren't exactly free-spirited open-source gurus either. it all remains to be seen. i'm just uneasy.

hey, i need to send you a birthday thing! that's this coming week, isn't it?

[talentshow.livejournal.com]

the 16th.

[tinywarrior.livejournal.com]

I loved ChickClick. Hadn't thought of that for a long time.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

I loved, loved, loved it too. I thought it was great, up until about mid-2000, when how commercial it was getting was becoming obvious (it was like... the stuff IN "ChickShops" was cool, but it bothered me that they HAD "ChickShops"). I really hated the way it eventually fell apart, and all because it was pushed to be superduper profitable. Basically I just don't like the idea of LJ going under the same kind of pressure, and ending up on fuckedcompany. =/