Fluffy Bunnies and Lilly pads
Lilly pads in the Helsinki Botanical Garden taken on XP2 film.
Well, the blogosphere experienced a collective slashdot moment over the past week with the sound and the fury over the news that the MovableType software decided to change licenses and pricing. While I read quite a lot more than I probably should have, I wasn't going to mention it here at all except that I think there are some valid concerns being drowned out by the angry rhetoric out there that resembles a playground where the popular kids still call the shots with the only discernable difference being that now they want far more than your lunch money. Amidst all the rage and rebuttals there are some older and calmer voices who have some interesting and intelligent things to say.
Perhaps the most surprising person to discuss the MT licensing switch is Alan Burlison. Alan is the British version of Jarkko as he is taciturn and shrewd with his opinions, particularly with technology. Alan's no freeloader as he has been an active perl developer for quite a few years, is largely responsible for all the perl in Solaris and helped CPAN get 3 free enterprise class systems from Sun for the CPAN search engine and other sites. He took particular notice of and offense to the original source being pulled from the 6A sites and the poorly written license. Phil Ringnalda also takes apart the license and this blog does the economics of the backlash. Shelley also has a heartfelt rant which, in spite of the vitriolic tone, is spot on. Licensing and copyright probably make my eyes glaze over faster than Dan Sugalski talking about the innards of the VMS kernel. There's nothing like getting an email from RMS over your morning coffee trying to stir the pot about licenses and the lack thereof on CPAN. It's not a great way to kick of your morning but, in the end, licenses and copyright in a litigation happy society do matter quite a lot, even if you think that there's no possible way to enforce them.
In an age where quite a few open source projects have made a profitable business out of offering service, support, consulting and training for their software, TypePad made, and still makes, a lot of sense in the 'everybody has got to eat' mantra that seems to be the most popular defense of the MT announcement. There is also corporate licensing of the software. I doubt anyone is actually going to starve at 6A, especially in America, so that's a bit of a red herring. So, too, is the argument that we're all a bunch of freeloaders. A lot of us are involved in open source in one form or another and have given our time freely to projects without compensation in the form of cash. Many of us are not zealots in the service of RMS or the FSF and actually buy software and shareware on a regular basis. We're a bunch of people who liked the software enough at one point to use it, continue to use it, donate a little money and now find all that good will replaced by a positively awful license and a fee schedule that seems all about screwing the very people who put them on the map to begin with.
In the end, it's just software that we can choose to use or not use, this is the one true shining light in the sea of words spawned by this whole debacle. However, it's rather galling when some call the reaction 'childish'. A lot of the opinions defending 6A against the onslaught sound eerily like the 'you're either with us or against us' anti-terrorism chant. We're not against them, but people tend to react negetively when they feel like they're being given only one option, one that is radically different than the one expected. I started using MT because Nat Torkington said he liked it and because the server I have my blog on also hosts a number of CPAN websites which already had mod_perl[obviously :)] but I didn't really want to wedge mod_php into it. Sure, I read the license and I lived with the 'free enough' attitude since it was reasonable to assume that they'd go the same way as a few of our friends have who are making 6 figures a year by selling training and support for their perl products. It comes down to a few sticking points that lead a thinking person to believe that there are parts to this story that we're still missing.
- What happened to the 2.6X source code? If we're all still welcome to continue using it for free, where is it? A new user who wants to install MT today will be forced to use MT3 which is still a development version.
- More than a few developers and coders on the beta test of MT3 have quietly registered a feeling of betrayal since they weren't informed of the license update any sooner than the rest of us. I don't know whether to think of that as an implication of sneaky doings behind the scenes or just a continuing pattern of infrequent communication.
- Aside from minor improvements in spam management, MT3's only new feature would appear to be the license which, after more than a year of promising the addition of some of the typepad features, is a huge disappointment.
These 3 things are primarily what is driving a lot of the discontent which put 6A into a reactive instead of proactive stance. Perhaps we should think that they do need the money to eat since I'd really like to believe that the license wasn't written by or checked by a practising copyright lawyer. But how could a company of smart people bungle this so incredibly badly? I mean, the Aw shucks, gee whiz kind of explanation is endearing like a fuzzy bunny, but if we're going to cough up $150 for a bit of software shouldn't we expect something a lot more polished and professional? When you ask people for $150 for your software and give them a license it's no longer about friends and fuzzy bunnies, it's a binding contract that deserves a lot more care and respect than it seems to be getting. It's a tough way to learn that it's essential to hire business professionals. Programmers always like to think they can be sysadmins, too. Well, at least until the system melts down at 4am and they've no clue what to do. Programmers always like to learn things the hard way I think.
Watching and waiting to see what happens is a good plan, but the WordPress application is really generating a lot of enthusiasm. There have been dozens more well done posts around the net about transitioning to another software package, PhotoMatt seems to be doing a fine job of rounding up many of them, including an amazing WordPress blog in Hindi. There's also a nicely done Blog software breakdown for people wanting to comparison shop. I'm going to wait another week or three and see what problems other people encounter and then move to WordPress, even if it is PHP. If it turns out that I wind up using WP, I'll even donate $150 to the project just on principle.
22 May 2004 at 15:51, Helsinki
