Please take it easy. I didn't say they are dismissable, you put those words in my mouth. I said they were an overreaction. And the ranting loon comment was aimed at a specific comment that got personal and insulting. I do not think everyone is a ranting look on this matter even if I disagree with their opinion.

"I don't understand how the use of bandwidth is an issue to SixApart for users of the freeware of MovableType. If they will not be listed anyway on their "Resently Updated List", then why put a limit on the amount of blogs that can be produced."

So let me try and help you understand. Let's start with a non-controversial hypothetical scenario. Oracle makes commercial database system. They have two users. A runs a thriving mail order business of 5 employees and is using Oracle's database on a PC acting as a server. B is the CIO of a major international bank with a Oracle database of million of customer accounts and their daily transactions which is power by a machines larger then a fridge. Should A and B pay the same amount for the same software? No. A couldn't afford what B pays and Oracle could not be in business if all they could charge is what A can afford. The support costs of B alone would make Oracle loose money at A price for a license. So Oracle has an ellaborate pricing scheme which tries to balance the cost of operation (and their obligations to investors to make a profit) with the perceived utility each get. These tiers are based on hardware/OS combination, number processors and in some situations number of seats or conccurrent users. Support is a seperate cost. These prices are actually quite flexible and are somewhat at the discresion of the sales representations. This is not unique to Oracle, many other commercial software companies have this setup.

So let's move on to Six Aparts situation. How do they balance the cost of operation and their obligations to investors to make a profit?

With TypePad they are providing hosting and can cap the disk space and bandwidth a user consumes which is how they measure a users utility -- it doesn't matter if you have a hundred low traffic weblogs with 10k entries or one just super popular weblog. They also cap number of weblogs and authors, but do away with that restriction for Pro users like yourself to incent you to go for the bigger package. (That's Marketing 101.) So, if you go over your limits you must be getting more use out of the system then other users and should have to pay more just like Oracle A and B.

With MT you get the software from them and are free to run it where ever you like. That means they can't cap your bandwidth or disk space usage because they don't provide the hosting. Now if they allow unlimited authors and unlimited weblogs with MT as you are demanding, how do they make money? How to they delineate the super user from the occasional hobbyist? What is to stop one person from getting a fat hosting account and setting up 200 MT weblogs for their friends, family, pets and plants? How is that fair compensation to a business like Six Apart? This is how so many dot.coms went out of business -- no substainable business model.

Make sense now?

I'm continuing to weed through the posts on this topics (especially those aimed at me) and have found that remarkably Jason Kottke has written a similar post as my above comment with a different spin that I think is reasonably well explained for unlimited personal licenses. Not sure if I agree, but I can't say it doesn't have its merits. It's here if you are interested in it: http://www.kottke.org/04/05/the-end-of-free

Timothy, I think Six Apart is ignoring the needs of the mid-level hobbyist, which frankly does not undercut or compete with any commercial use of the product. I host quite a few blogs and authors on my mediajunkie server, all for free. The whole setup costs me money, despite a trickle from Google ads (at the sites which are not explicitly noncommercial in every way).

Perhaps you could say that I'm competing with Six Apart because my subusers might have to use TypePad instead, but I would direct anyone who would be better off with TypePad there directly. I even have some discount codes remaining for such people and I recommend that service a lot when appropriate.

The fact is that most of my authors have been coaxed into the medium by the ease of working directly with me. If I didn't offer them the hosting and service, they wouldn't be buying Movable Type on their own, let alone TypePad.

They'd probably instead put off joining the living web for another few years, or conceivably go with the new Blogger, which seems poised to incorporate LJ-style social networking from its profile pages and new comment system.

Obviously Six Apart has the right to do whatever they want with their new product. I haven't personally said that I feel betrayed or anything like that, although some of the RFB staff has of course posted things to that effect (which is their prerogrative - I don't censor the editorial content of this site to match my own opinions).

I do think that 6A is missing an opportunity to offer a pricing schedule geared toward the early-adopter / enthusiast / hobbyist / influencer, and I'd be willing to discuss that with Anil or anyone else inside 6A if they're interested in my ideas on that matter.

Tim,

Thanks for responding. I'll you give a longer version as a post. The shorter version is:

1. I don't mind paying for the service. Le's make that clear.
I mind the pricing structure and the restrictions. Many users keep private blogs for a variety of reasons: Link lists, photoblogs, categorization, their cat's blog, recipe sources. Guess what? At this rate I have to pay $100 or up for what is basically a standard blogging practice which is to parse out data into several blogs and then, hmmmmmm, maybe use YOUR RSS plugin to aggregate them?

2. Nobody contacted me to ask how I use MT.
I was contacted about what I wanted in a service as TP but SixApart did not proceed with due diligence in finding out how exactly the common gung-ho blogist uses their product. That's called Market Research and it is part of the 101 curriculum.

3. If you want to cap the bandwidth used for the "Recently Updated List", there are other ways to do it.
I paid for 2 keys ($45). That should allow me to have 2 blogs in that list. So let it be. Let me create as many blogs as I want, use your plug-in or the OTHERBLOGS to update my posts into an "update" blog that uses one of the two keys I have already purchased.

4. This is related to #2 : SixApart has turned its back on its community of bloggers. The newbies or technophobes can go and use TP. I send people over to them all the time. Corporations will always need some level of ultra-customization especially when it comes to complying with whatever standards of security they have. So charge them accordingly. It is the people in the middle, like me and XIAN and Scriptygoddes and Kottke and a whole lot of other people who not only have paid for the software as donationware but have contributed to the enhancement of the product that are getting kicked in the ass with the new licensing structure.

Kayellebee points out that if the licensing does not suit you, you can send them a note and they'll work something out. Well, here's the deal : Are they going to work out 500, 1000, 5000 different licensing structures?

Tim, again, they have the right to make money. I do not need TypePad, really, if I have MT. But I keep it becuase I am curious to see what they can come up with. This is my frigging way of supporting THEM. Any other person would say fuck it and not pay. It's forgetting how they got to the point where they are right now is the reason for the outcry.

I literally wrote the book that consumer affairs representatives use at Colgate-Palmolive Company**. I spent four years of my life writing, coding, editing and training people on how to not just handle problem questions like "my toothpaste is all dried up", but how to use these situations in order to get more information about consumers and eventually use that information for research, development, branding and marketing. In the last 7 years CP has come out with an incredible amount of brand extensions and it all has to do with how the CA department captured the users/consumers communications and translated that to the people at corporate, r&D, marketing, etc. For years the VPs at that dept struggled to make their data relevant up until this project I was involved (the CRS software was streamlined out of the training process).

So it's not that I have no experience on how to interact and communicate with a consumer base. I do. What I am shocked is how 6A for years tapped into the loyalty of their users for further develop their product, get the VA money and, all of a sudden, forget what get them where they are. To get a clue about how they should have set the licensing structure for personal use, all they need to do was to go through the archives of the support forum. If they did not want to send out questionnaires and/or have meetings around the country/world with a base of super to middle users, they have the information right their at their disposal. Maybe they need to add one more job to the list.

4. VC funding, in the end, should never come between a nascent company and their core economy. The core economy of MT is the gift/volunteer economy. I agree 100% with what Kottke says in his post. Charge whatever you want to charge for TP and set fees up the wazoo for corporations. But for the people who are basically your unpaid R&D department, set it so they continue making your money. Because, Tim, let's be honest, they are making money out of our hobby. I can't get VC funding for my blogging, you know. But that's not the point of the economy of blogging (at least in re to MT). The value cannot really be measure in $. It is measured in what the community of users give them back.

So there you have it. Yes, I want to pay if I have more features and flexibility. Now, cap however many blogs I can have and ...

**Good move from my employers. I know 4 languages, am a teacher and am a vast repository of what seems like useless information. I am definitely NOT CA Rep material. Now how to teach them to deal with people like me, in that, I am the mistress and diva ;)

I have to second Timothy's suggestion to read Kottke's piece. I was going to broach the subject of the rollout of 3.0 here on RFB but as I was giving it some thought I came across Jason's post and felt he said it all.

The clarifications which came out today do certainly help make sense of a lot of this. Not that it is any of my business and I do not really care but I wonder if perhaps Mena herself is in need of delegating out some fo the PR responsibility. Both the TypeKey rollout and the 3.0 Dev Release rollout seem like the work of folks who haven't had decent sleep and haven't had a chance to step back and look at how these things would be received.

That being said I'm looking forward to upgrading my installation and seeing what the dev community will do with MT3.