verbminx | the buyout.

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

the buyout.

movable type and six apart