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.

[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?

[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.)

[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.

[talentshow.livejournal.com]

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

[tinywarrior.livejournal.com]

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