The Latest Faux Net Outrage
Geek are funny and predictable. For those that use weblogging software, you probably have heard about Movable Type (MT) , or at the very least say "Powered by Movable Type" at the bottom of a site you frequently read, like this one. MT is everywhere. It was mostly free for personal use. You could donate and get a key which gave you special super powers. Actually it didn't give you super powers, but it did let you ping movabletype.org when you made a new post and you could see your weblog in lights on the mt.org site.
Anway...
It costs money now. The reaction of the community in large seems like it was stage managed. A post on sixapart.com early in the morning, like an earthquake with a larger aftershock it ended up creating a tsunami of outrage. Metafilter and slashdot were filled with posts about the end of the world as we know it. Okay, not the end of the world as we know it, but people were clearly talking about migrating away from MT to some other software for which they would not have to pay. Some made moral arguments while others admitted they were just cheap bastards.
As the tsunami hit land and lost power, a few people dried themselves off and started forming a growing voice of reason. They stated arguments as if they had put themselves in the shoes of Six Apart. Novel concept I know. They usually admitted that they didn't like some of the news either, but did try and understand why the news had come. They also argued that this news was not carved in stone and could and probably would be changed, as has been shown in past news bombs from Six Apart.
And today the news was changed. Almost everyone has dried off from the tsunami and more people are adding to the voice of reason. I haven't agreed with every part of every voice of reason argument. Specifically I have a tiny nitpick with a lot of people talking about open source, often represented by apache, perl, php, mysql, postgresql, etc. I think a lot of people don't understand how much commercial development money goes into these projects. Yahoo!, IBM, Covalent, and Red Hat all put tremendous resources into apache since they have products that rely on it. By the way Brad, there is a commercial version of Apache. Although I understand what you meant, I'm just sayin' is all. IBM and Red Hat with the linux kernel, not to mention SGI. Mozilla anyone? These are all projects that were lucky enough to get to the level of quality where a business could justify putting money into helping the project out.
How many open source project have you seen get crushed by their own popularity? Even if you get free project hosting there is still the issue of developer time. As your project grows in popularity more people tend to use it. As more people use it, they request features and bug fixes. Those things take time. Time is money. Therein lies our dilemma. Laughing at the faux outrage was fun though. I can't wait until the next one!
