Many-to-Many: MT Licensing vs Weblogs.com Shutdown:
Last month, Six Apart changed the terms of their software licensing, for a new product. Public reaction was swift and scathing. Hundreds of users tracked back to Mena’s announcement of the changes, most of them outraged by the lack of warning, and the impact on current users. (I was one of those who expressed concerns.) [ . . . ] And, as many people pointed out, their announcements had no effect on existing sites, which continued to run under the original license.
In contrast, this past weekend, Dave Winer pulled the plug on ~3,000 weblogs that had been hosted on the weblogs.com server. He did this with no warning to the writers involved. All links to those sites now point to this page, which has only an audio file from Dave to explain the reasoning decision—meaning it can’t be quoted or searched (or even accessed at all by those who are deaf, hard of hearing, or unable to listen to sound files on their computer).
Count me in as one of those who grumbled about the licensing for MT 3.0 and how the lack of communication was beyond ironic . . . now we have Dave Winer just dropping 3000 people’s content on the floor, no warning, no links to backups, nothing, and for reasons I don’t understand (though Liz’s assumptions above make sense, given his track record), his explanation is an audio file. No text, not even a transcription of the audio.
As noted here:
How does Dave Winer handle criticism? He deletes what he doesn’t like. It may not be personal, it may even be on topic, but if it’s not what he wants to see, it’s gone. See here.
What a strange little man . . . .
more on this from Joho the Blog: Dave Winer deigns to address his public and you can even find a link to the transcribed audio note.
But best of was this suggestion on how the pain of this could have been minimized:
“Just curious, how would you alert 3000 people that their sites were about to go away…”
Damn! If only someone could invent some kind of push format that you could regularly pick up and had, like, news in it… I bet that’d be really good for this!