I’m confused. Really. Like Michael Pusatieri, I just don’t get it.
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.) From what I can tell, SixApart has been working hard to address the problems in the proposed licensing, and I’ve heard rumors that some significant improvements are about to be announced. 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). The response from the blogosphere has been less than deafening.
So, why the differing responses? I suspect that part of it is the difference in the scope of impact. The MT changes affected several more than an orders of magnitude more bloggers than the weblogs.com decision. And the MT changes directly affected (and caught by surprise) some of the highest profile bloggers using the software, while Dave cleverly exempted the highest profile blogger on weblogs.com, Doc Searls, from the unannounced shutdown.
(I suspect that another factor is the differing behavioral expectations that the blog community has of the Six Apart crew versus Dave Winer; no one who knows all the parties involved needs much explanation there.)
The important lesson to be carried away from all this, however, is something that’s been said many times before. Don’t put all your data in someone else’s basket, no matter how much you like or trust the person (or company) holding the basket. Use your own domain name, keep your data in a form that can be repurposed, and always (always, always!) keep a regular backup of that data in a separate location. As Jerry Lawson of netlawblog.com says, “plan for success,” and build your infrastructure to support that by reducing your dependence upon the kindness of strangers.
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Update: Brad deLong has a nice musing on the expectations issue:
it’s a free service, a free gift that he gave, and he has no obligation to provide notice or warning or anything beforehand before discontinuing it.
But people using weblogs.com—and people using other free and open-source internet services—may have different expectations about persistence and warning and notice and graceful shutdown, expectations that may well be very naive. But without those expectations of persistence and warning and notice and graceful shutdown, it’s hard to see how anyone can justify building a system around free and open-source components. An internet in which open-source and free software are routinely used as building blocks is one in which expectations of persistence and warning and notice and graceful shutdown have to be validated. An internet in which you can expect persistence, et cetera only if you pay for it is a quite different animal
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One Last Update
James Grimmelman on LawMeme has written an insightful essay on expectations, obligations, and credibility. Well worth reading.
1. anonymouse on June 15, 2004 5:52 PM writes...
I'm also left wondering why when Typekey (the centralized MT comment posting service) was announced, it was compared to the Patriot Act and considered an extreme invasion of personal privacy, but Blogger launched central comments for all their sites that optionally required a Blogger.com login, making it a less flexible version of Typekey and it didn't have any API.
Maybe 6A shouldn't announce stuff before it launches anymore, it seems they catch all the heat.
Permalink to Comment2. Glenn Fleishman on June 15, 2004 5:59 PM writes...
Blogger is hosted centrally, so you've already bought into a certain kind of set of limitations when you use Blogger. Movable Type, while it can be hosted by SA or others, can be run locally, so you're probably running it to have more independence, thus TypeKey is much more centralized than any system you'd want.
If I could run LocalTypeKey on my own server, and TypeKey via their system -- so that I could choose to either register TypeKey users in my own database or in theirs -- that would provide enough flexibility.
As for Weblogs.com, I don't really understand the business relationship between Frontier and its former boss. Doc mentioned something about the Weblogs.com stuff migrating, but there's some private business issue here that we obviously don't know anything about as outsiders.
I moved my site off Weblogs.com a while ago because I realized that free is exactly what you pay for. I'm willing, for instance, to try out Gmail from Google with the expectation that they could lose all my email forever. This happened to a Hotmail customer recently. There's little obligation and no remorse. We don't know how they build their backends when they're free.
Free server stuff always has a price tag attached. Free software does not.
Permalink to Comment3. Seth Finkelstein on June 15, 2004 7:04 PM writes...
I believe Doc Searls is on paid hosting, that's why he's not affected.
Permalink to Comment4. Scott Rafer on June 15, 2004 9:26 PM writes...
Feedster chiming in. We obviously care a lot about blogdom but also know the pain of offering a free service over time, so excuse that I'm not joining the debate over who did what to whom and when.
After we heard the news, we took a look at whether we could help support DaveW and the community in transitioning the free blogs off of weblogs.com. Looking through our index, it appears that a large number of the 3,000 blogs have been abandoned, so the current work of a relatively small number of people are affected. It still hurts for those people, but I think that there are few enough who still care that a solution can be found.
Has anyone started a wiki or other mechanism to collect the web page and RSS URLs of the bloggers affected? If so, please point me at it. post --- at --- raferdotnet
Permalink to Comment5. phil jones on June 15, 2004 10:01 PM writes...
"So, why the differing responses?"
Presumably because those bloggers affected are now, by definition, not able to comment on their blogs :-)
Permalink to Comment6. Brian Dennis on June 15, 2004 10:47 PM writes...
"The MT changes affected several orders of magnitude more users...". Whoa there pardner! At the lower limit that calculates to a cool 300,000 MT users. I knew MT was popular, but not that popular.
Citations to back up this claim?
And I'm happy to have my skepticism eliminated.
Permalink to Comment7. Randy Charles Morin on June 15, 2004 10:57 PM writes...
You're confused that providing a service for free leads to pissing off customers? It's amazing how the free software movement doesn't get it and then says 'they are confused'.
Permalink to Comment8. Adam Hill on June 15, 2004 11:10 PM writes...
I think the main reason the Blogosphere has not responded with 'great vengeance and furious anger' is that Dave is holding most of those blogs 'hostage'. If he decides not to export them because of a perceived slight or criticism, those that do not have backups are SOL.
Not that DW would do anything like that on purpose, but then again people did not think he would have the nerve to pull the plug on 3K+ weblogs either without so much as a 1 day warning...
Permalink to Comment9. Liz Lawley on June 16, 2004 8:07 AM writes...
Brian, I did some checking just now. The BlogCensus market share numbers (which don't have a date associated with them) show over 40K MT blogs. MT doesn't post market share numbers, but in May a press release claimed that they'd "seen a 50 percent increase in sales of Movable Type's Commercial product in the last quarter, and a 250 percent increase over a year." I suspect that the number probably is close to 300K, when you factor in the number of blogs that are probably out there but don't "ping" services regularly (my son and his friends all have blogs on MT, for example, but I set them up in relative "stealth" mode). Nevertheless, I've edited the paragraph to reduce the hyperbole. :)
Randy, no, I'm not "confused that providing a service for free leads to pissing off customers"--I'm confused by the difference in the reactions to two companies that both changed the terms of their "free" offers.
Permalink to Comment10. Barnaby James on June 16, 2004 9:47 AM writes...
Probably the reason for the different treatment (and it seems like plenty of people are complaining now) is that people have come to expect software that is free (or kinda free in this case) will remain free but we've all become used to free services going away.
I've yet to hear from anyone who is actually affected by this - it's always a "concerned 3rd party". Anyone who seriously expects cradle to grave free hosting is probably stuck in 1999 if you ask me though... It seems to me that if you are affected by this you should write a note to Dave, thanking him for 5 years of free hosting, find yourself a hosting company and pay them.
Permalink to Comment11. Liz Lawley on June 16, 2004 9:56 AM writes...
Barnaby, I've heard privately from people that are directly affected that they don't feel they can speak publicly until they've got their data in hand.
I've not heard from anyone who feels entitled to continued free hosting, or who doesn't think Dave has every right to stop providing the service. The concern is over the lack of notice regarding the shutdown, which left people without their data, and the uncertainty of getting that data back.
I think you're right, however, in noting the difference between "free software" and "free services," and the expectations associated with each.
Permalink to Comment12. Tom Maszerowski on June 16, 2004 10:26 AM writes...
Liz, I think it comes down to expectations. With MT, people expected it to be free, even though MT was never Free Software. The Trott's are basically nice people so it came a surprise (though it shouldn't have) when they changed the terms. In the weblogs.com case, it's also expectations, but of an entirely different sort. I think you know what I mean, so there's no need to rehash things here.
The difference in the handling of the changes between the two companies will matter a lot in a year, when the initial furor fades to a whisper. SA has actually listened to its user base, and while it may not please everyone, there's a power to listening that's hard to ignore. Compare that to a sudden turn off, with no warning and not even a request for funding help (there's an assumption that the weblogs.com users wouldn't pay, but were they asked?). Reputation matters.
Permalink to Comment13. Ben Hammersley on June 16, 2004 1:13 PM writes...
Aside from the sheer bad manners of the whole thing, I'm astounded by continual talk of it being free hosting.
Yes, it didn't cost the blog authors anything, but let's not think Userland provided this hosting out of the goodness of their hearts. They're a business, with two major weblogging platforms - Radio and Manila - to sell.
Having a vibrant install of over 3000 sites sat on that extremely peachy domain name, all running Userland software, all by default using Userland templates, and all linking to Userland's own site, was worth a considerable amount to them. In terms of reputation, in terms of getting funding, and in terms of sheer usage data, they could easily say "Manila is a great platform: just look at all these users" and then sell it on the strength of the 3000 weblogs.com users alone. Installations of that size are precisely the market Userland are in.
It was a marketing exercise, not a charity: there was plenty of quid pro quo.
Permalink to Comment14. Brian Dennis on June 17, 2004 11:25 PM writes...
Liz, well done. Salting my crow even as I type this.
That's a whole lotta MT out there.
Permalink to Comment15. Lawrence Krubner on June 18, 2004 12:43 AM writes...
My god you people are polite! Do you realize how polite you are being? I can hardly believe I'm reading something on the web! This post and its comments read like a careful magazine letters page, with all the letters edited for topicalness by the editor.
Look, let's be clear. Dave Winer was a hero to a lot of people back in the 1980s when he brought scripting to the Macintosh. Way back then he was one of the reasons why us Mac users could say our computers were way better than anyone else's. Dave was brilliant in his youth, and one of the people you could think about say he really "got" it. Lately? The last 10 years? That's been a different story.
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