i'm going to do it. i'm going to chime in on, you know, that licensing brouhaha . i've been writing a post for days, but it always devolves into incoherence, as i try to wrap together 10 different points in one easy to digest post. i thought about separating them into individual posts, but that'll never happen, so i'm just going to go with an "impressionistic" version that won't make sense to anyone.

i'm certain that dan bricklin is writing something with a much deeper historical perspective than i could ever muster about the licensing issues beyond what he's quickly put together . but even in that short piece, there's a nugget of wisdom that bears repeating:

"The thing to learn here is that the choice of how you differentiate between users for pricing is a key element in a product's feature-set. You had better be pretty clear about the philosophy behind that differentiation and change it at your peril."

it's fascinating to watch the different movabletype user groups talk past each other as they try to come to grips with how sixapart views them and institutionalizes that viewpoint in their product and service terms of use and pricing policies. of course, there's the howling masses who drank the ben and mena kool aid and merely prove the age-old maxim that "...releasing a free version of your software does not provide any information about how many people are willing to pay for it." but what's far more interesting is to see the reactions of the "personal power users" as they come to grips with the fact that while ben and mena might have found them useful at one stage of the company's development, sixapart doesn't and needs to find ways to "...[show] they're appreciated without actually creating *more* of them and the overhead they generate. That means a simple price drop is out. Go too cheap with too much and you start to cannibalize TypePad, after all. .

fwiw, [ which is probably close to nothing ], it looks like i'm closest to pete , kellan and mark , but only when i put a particular hat on. when i wear one hat, blogger , the manual typewriter of blogging tools , is "good enough". it works and it's "free-as-in-beer", but the decision to stick with it was made with eyes wide open. when i put another hat on drupal or wordpress get chosen because, to paraphrase mark, "free enough" is never free enough. roosters will always come home to roost and pipers will always ask to get paid and you have to ask yourself if you're willing to get left holding the bag.

sometimes i am and sometimes i'm not.