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]

hee! that's cool!