Jason Kottke provides a post I can’t make any sense of whatsoever. He agrees with Dave Winer that people complaining about the new MovableType price structure are whiners. Then he makes reference to the fact that Six Apart is going to provide the same free software as they always have (eh? I need to re-read the announcement. I also saw a posting that you could still download 2.661, but I couldn’t find it and the poster hasn’t told me how he knows that).
Then he wanders into his own gripes about the pricing strategy . . . he has 10 weblogs and 22 authors, but “[b]y my reckoning, I’m one person using MT in a exclusively personal manner to maintain one Web site.”
He also suggests some counter-proposals: doesn’t that make him a whiner just like the rest of us?
I do have to give him credit for mentioning the community goodwill that seems to be where the whiners are feeling unhappy. And he suggests that 6A could have done/could still do a better job at finding how people use their stuff. That would be a good first step to building out a revenue model.
As I reflected on this tempest in a teapot today, it breaks down to how well 6A can build a company and serve a community or if they have to choose. My guess is they can do both — if they want to.