If they expect us to shell out $69.95 for a personal licence. I mean, sure, we all expected them to go commercial (read "sell out") one day, it's not news by any means; but $69.95 for a limited amount of authors and weblogs with a half-baked CPU restriction and a half-functioning "developer edition"? I think not.
Whether or not all or any of these restrictions in the free are written as crippleware or are on some "honour-system" basis, this just goes to show that Six Apart is slowly tightening the screws on independent bloggers in order to route users (and profits) into their prefab, all-in-one TypePad service.
What more, their clever "pioneering" TypeKey service, which claims to be a solution to blog spam, is very, very reminiscent of the Microsoft Passport "service" - a means of rewarding Microsoft-friendly sites and affiliates with ease of accessibility and integration.
In my experience, anything requiring one to register, to give one's name, address - or, worse yet, one's e-mail address - is a means of control and marketeering - not convenience (think about your driver's licence, SIN card, medicare card, student ID, library card, Safeway card, bank card and credit cards - and how a sufficiently knowledgeable person can re-create or even steal your very identity, let alone shape your preferences through researching your behaviour and pressuring you through marketing).
TypeKey's very essence is even more similar to those universal adult site "keys," such as SexKey and AdultCheck, which are no more than vehicles for agglomeration economies.
One look at Mena's "It's About Time" post reveals how far Movable Type had come - from a friendly group of professionals who made an invaluable tool, to a faceless group of salesmen trying to make a buck while attempting to assuage users' indignation with words and phrases such as "pride," "we won't forget the users" and, of course, "honour."
As always, the (mostly) wise people on the Slashdot forum had the best words in the best order:
I've been hit by this kind of thing before. Now I really look hard at the license. If you use proprietary stuff, you are at the mercy of the owner. It's not just a Microsoft thing, folks.And as for questions of proprietary software:
With a car, it's easy to switch to a different brand. There's not much new to learn; if you can drive one car, you can drive another. And if you can drive a stick, you can drive damn near anything on the road. Maybe not to the best of the car's abilities, but you can still get from point A to point B.I've got to add one more thing to that: sure, I haven't paid one red Canadian cent for any release of Movable Type, but if it weren't for users like me and thousands of others like me, actively using releases, some even actively betatesting releases - for free, all the while giving the blogging system a good name through everything from word-of-mouth to search engine popularity, blogrolling and whatever else - where would Movable Type be? So in a way...shouldn't I charge a fee for my marketing and betatesting services?With software, it's generally much more difficult to switch vendors. System requirements and means of configuration, not to mention configuration options, are often vastly different.
Granted, proficiency with the underlying principles (Component functions in a car, protocols in software) go a long way in easing change. However, while many people aren't familiar with cars beyond filling the tank and checking the oil, most people aren't familiar with the workings of databases and HTTP.
The Winamp 3 fiasco and the subsequent Winamp 5 release had taught us anything is that companies and corporations - no matter how big (and Winamp is now owned by AOL, if I am not mistaken) are all about providing a product people like, payment or not. The equation is simple: user discontent equals lack of popularity, lack of popularity leads to a low corporate profile and identity and that means anything and everything from simple banner ad revenue losses to complete brand or identity destruction due to its self-inflicted obscurity. Hopefully, Six Apart will realize what's good for them, before it's too late.