So, I noticed something at Slashdot a while ago.
On Red Hat selling a commercial version of Linux:
Wah! They're making money from someone else's hard work! They should pay Linus!
On Red Hat trying to hire Linus to do kernel development:
Wah! They're trying to take over Linux!
On Red Hat going public:
Wah! They're making money from someone else's hard work! They should let the developers in on the stock!
On Red Hat grepping the kernel source and sending an invite to everyone who'd contributed anything ever:
Wah! Why are they spamming people!
On Red Hat creating Fedora instead of trying to shift box sets at retail:
Wah! Why are they abandoning the retail market!
I actually stopped reading regularly a while before that last one, but noticed it when I dropped by a few months back. I'm confident I've missed some other bitchfest in the interim.
And my life is so much poorer for it, I'm sure.
Got a very similar vibe reading some of the trackbacks regarding the MT 3.0 announcement(s). Yes, there were some valid points and complaints, but they were buried in an avalance of, "under the combined fury of the blogosphere, the evil Six Apart has backed down from their evil, greedy license scheme" type shit.
Luckily for me, reading these had the happy side effect of reversing that pesky gypsy curse.
Meaning I can respond to them with no restraint whatsoever.
Most of you have never seen me responding to things with no restraint whatsoever.
You don't want to. Trust me on this one.
They're not evil, just abandoning the upper-end geek market, which is the people who made them, completely. They're positioning for small- and mid-size company CMS work, and ideally moving consumers to TypePad. I just wish they'd said that was what they were with 3.0 back in December when they said "there will be a free version" but not "and everyone who wants to use the features that make MT worthwile will pay through the nose", so I could have been looking at other solutions all along.
The fact that they are not evil does not mean I will not suggest they kiss my sweet Texas grits, nor does it mean that I will ever recommend their product again. "They are not evil" does not equal "I am not pissed off at them". I brung them, and they are not dancing with me any more.
I am looking on the bright site: it's good to clean out cruft in one's blogs on occasion.
Bright side, even. Bleah six-fingered typing.
I remember a few years ago, when Linux first went mainstream, there was a small contingent that insisted open source was going to destroy the software industry and make programmers redundant. The Slashdot crowd responded correctly that open source would be good for the software industry as business figured out ways to make money off it.
Now exactly that is happening, and they're upset. They must have never believed their own talking points.
Personally, I'm still going to switch to a totally-free CMS at some point, but I really like Perl and static pages better than PHP and dynamic generation, so I haven't yet figured out what that CMS will be.