i’m going to do it. i’m going to chime in on, you know,

that licensing brouhaha

. i’ve been writing a post for days, but it always devolves into
incoherence, as i try to wrap together 10 different points in one
easy to digest post. i thought about separating them into
individual posts, but that’ll never happen, so i’m just going to go
with an “impressionistic” version that won’t make sense to anyone.

i’m certain that
dan bricklin

is writing something with a much deeper historical perspective than
i could ever muster about the

licensing

issues beyond what he’s

quickly put together

. but even in that short piece, there’s a nugget of wisdom that
bears repeating:

“The thing to learn here is that the choice of how you
differentiate between users for pricing is a key element in a
product’s feature-set. You had better be pretty clear about the
philosophy behind that differentiation and change it at your
peril.”

it’s fascinating to watch the different
movabletype

user groups talk past each other as they try to come to grips with
how
sixapart

views them and institutionalizes that viewpoint in their product
and service terms of use and pricing policies. of course, there’s
the

howling

masses

who drank the
ben

and
mena

kool aid and merely prove the age-old maxim that
“…releasing a
free version of your software does not provide any information
about how many people are willing to pay for it.”

but what’s far more interesting is to see the reactions of the
“personal power users” as they come to grips with the fact that
while
ben

and
mena

might have found them useful at one stage of the company’s
development,
sixapart

doesn’t and needs to find ways to
“…[show] they’re appreciated
without actually creating *more* of them and the overhead they
generate. That means a simple price drop is out. Go too cheap with
too much and you start to cannibalize TypePad, after all.

.

fwiw, [ which is probably close to nothing ], it looks like i’m
closest to
pete

,
kellan

and

mark

, but only when i put a particular hat on. when i wear one hat,
blogger

, the

manual typewriter of blogging tools

, is “good enough”. it works and it’s “free-as-in-beer”, but the
decision to stick with it was made with eyes wide open. when i put
another hat on
drupal

or
wordpress

get chosen because, to paraphrase mark, “free enough” is never free
enough. roosters will always come home to roost and pipers will
always ask to get paid and you have to ask yourself if
you’re willing to get left holding the bag.

sometimes i am and sometimes i’m not.