Movable Type Bitch
I hate bitching, moaning, and whining.
I’ve been attempting to figure out how to write this entry without doing any of those.
I haven’t figured out how, so this will be an exercise in self loathing.
This is an entry that the geeks will follow. Others, try to tag along.
Okay, what started the whole fucking rent was when Six Apart announced its licensing scheme for Movable Type 3.0. (Its the program I use to run this eJournal, as well as my other eJournals and the Interestring Websites page.
Part of the problem is for many people it was a pretty radical change. Movable Type<=2.661 was essentially monetarily free for all non-commercial purposes. As the license for Movable Type 3.0 stands now that is no longer the case.
Some of the “geek” bloggers have been migrating to WordPress. They admittedly like it because it is GPL licensed, meaning that the license can never change on them. Lets put this right out there:
This rent isn’t as much about Movable type as it is about intellectual property in general. First off no one is forcing anyone to abandon their current license of Movable Type. Part of the current culture war is determining what the rights of consumers should be. Consumers want the right to do whatever they damn please with intellectual property. Just look at the P2P networks. I don’t blame the record companies for suing file sharers. I don’t think it a good business strategy, but they make their money from controlling intellectual property. The concern is if they exert too much control the consumers have had usage rights ripped out from under them that they previously had when they paid for the product.
An example, you used to legally have the right to make a copy of a VHS movie you purchased for backup purposes. This is one of the rights that consumers used to have. The problem was consumers abused this right, and gave away copies. The movie studios then started using Macrovision, a technology that the movie to be watched but not copied. This story goes on and on but essentially content producers keep working on novel ways to “protect” their works and consumers keep finding novel ways to circumvent those protections. Its a simple war of mutual aggression. We might as well declare WWIII now. (Assuming it hasn’t already started.)
Back to Movable Type. Us bloggers and eJournalers have enjoyed a whole bunch of free enough software. Mark Pilgrim excellently frames the issue, although he also goes on and bitches too much. It was almost free, and every version except 3.0 is still almost free. You could argue that even GPL’d software isn’t free because if you modify it you cannot license your modifications under any terms you’d want, this is the equivalent of getting a free ice cream cone at the ice cream shop, but being told that when you take a shit you’ve gotta return it to the ice cream shop to be reused by anyone who wishes to reuse it. There are specific economic costs with the GPL license, specifically you do not have the freedom to choose whichever license you like for any derivative work. (I’ll admit right up front even my entries here are not free, they’re licensed under a Creative Commons License.)
So what am I going to do as far as upgrading? I’m not going to. I’m quite happy with my almost free Movable Type. Like I commented on MetaGrrrl’s blog I’m miffed but I’ll live. I’ve considered Word Press, but quite frankly I’m not impressed with the feel of the blogs that are using it now. I still think Movable Type is a better choice. Perhaps because I’ve not been able to get Phil‘s RSS to load, and as far as I can tell it is because of how Word Press functions and the speed of his server. I’ve given up bugging him about it.
Timothy Appnel has also written an excellent piece about Movable Type and Eating, although I didn’t find anywhere to work it in.
Yeah. So thats my bitch. Movable Type, is free enough and damn it I’l stick with it.