Nobody seems to get it
The whole Movable Type debate rages on, and as per usual, the entire debating body seems to have seperated into two camps:
Camp A: knee-jerk allies of Six Apart who refuse to accept that by charging for software and eliminating the free component for all but the most menial tasks basically destroys the “free, use it anywhere” appeal of MT. Think people who aren’t in Camp B are cheap bastards who didn’t add any value to MT in the first place.
Camp B: Vehemently opposed to any pay-for-play options at all. Believe that Six Apart has treated their users like shit and that they don’t deserve anything other than a kick in the ass. Think the people in Camp A are idiotic assholes who can’t see the forest for the trees.
The truth:
Camp A is wrong because free users (po’ folk like myself) are valuable insofar as they increase the userbase/market penetration without significantly decreasing potential income (i.e. I wouldn’t have bought it anyway, so they didn’t really lose any money.) Camp B is wrong because there is always value in commercializing software, it’s just that 6A did it totally wrong. Had they just extended their license a little bit, trying to cover the commercial users and the ’successful’ bloggers, they might have been successful, but where they tried to snare all the po’folk like me, they managed to create a massive PR disaster. Aim at foot, fire, repeat.
2.661 will be free only until it becomes unprofitable to offer it/update it at which point it will be dropped like a hot rock; commercial software and free software rarely coexists together, and where it does, it’s usually the free stemming from the commercial and not the other way around. Either way, anybody who refuses to pay will be labeled as a cheapass by the MT community, so 2.661 users might as well just kiss their asses goodbye now. (God, I really hate people a lot.)
So I’m gonna beat the rush and start looking for alternatives now. Something GPL, so I won’t get fucked over or be constatly harangued because I’m cheap (i.e. poor, which I am.) Apparently there is now something wrong with wanting something for nothing. This being the basic tenet of capitalism, I don’t understand why so many people object to it.