Stardate 20030622.1239

(On Screen): Free ain't cheap. Your time is worth something, and sometimes paying for something good is better than the headaches you get from trying to save money.

I wrote recently about alternative tools for Blogger, due to Blogger's serious flaws in terms of performance and reliability, not to mention some pretty major bugs that inhibit other people from linking to your posts and driving traffic to you.

I use CityDesk, a commercial product. I have a full license, which cost me about $350. I also wrote in that post about Movable Type, which is available for free but which is less polished.

A couple of days later I posted that Kathy Kinsley, she of the Third Hand, was going to start a small hosting service whereby people could pay a small fee per month for a site which would have Movable Type on it.

Even in the most optimistic of predictions, Kathy isn't going to become wealthy doing this. Likely about the best she'll do is break even or make a bit of pocket-change out of it, running a system with a few dozen users. And it appears she's still going to offer this service, but it isn't going to be based on Movable Type. Kathy received a nasty letter from the folks behind MT telling her she was violating their license agreement, and demanding either that she cease forthwith or that she fork over a big fee for a professional license.

I'm not happy about that. I wrote a long article recently praising Movable Type, and now I want to take it all back. And what this shows is that there's more to a program than the code itself. Blogger sucks because the code is buggy. It appears Movable Type may have started to suck because of the people who are working on it. (And it may also have showed that in the long run, bargains aren't.)

I'm even more glad now than I was before that I use CityDesk. Not only is the program itself extremely solid and reliable, but Fog Creek is an honorable company which has not caused me even the slightest amount of grief. That's worth $350 to me, and cheap at the price. I have to wonder whether I might have actually ended up with the cheapest answer, once you take into account everything. Yeah, it was a lot of money up front. But there have been no headaches.

After my original post, Anil Dash wrote to me thanking me for what I'd said about MT. Anil and I go back a long way; I met him back when I used to spend a lot of time on MetaFilter. Anil was one of the bloggers who appeared on that PBS "Media Matters" sequence about blogging, along with Oliver Willis, Megan McCardle (Jane Galt) and Glenn Reynolds.

So I was happy to see an email from Anil about that post. I hadn't been aware that he'd gotten professionally involved in the MT project. He also pointed out that Six Apart was starting its own hosting service with MT, so I added an update linking to it. (That link remains in that post because I don't Orwellize my archives, but I'm not going to link to it again here, for reasons which will become clear.)

And when Kathy posted about her nasty letter from MT, I felt as if I was indirectly involved because of my endorsement of MT. I sent the following letter to Anil:

What's this about?

Kathy is not using MT in a commercial sense of setting up ad-supported sites. She's offering a hosting service where each user uses MT privately, non-commercially, and she's helping each person to set up MT on it.

What the hell is with this cease-and-desist order? Kathy is one of the good guys (girls), dude.

Is it that what she's doing is in direct competition with your new venture? That's pretty ungracious, especially since there's plenty of room for everyone.

Anil responded as follows (with copies to Richard Bennett and to what I think was Kathy though at an email address I didn't recognize):

Hey, caught this thread just now. I clarified the email I sent Kathy on her site, which wasn't trying to C&D her at all, and I apologized to her on her site if that's how she felt I was responding.

If it's like you've described, then there's no problem at all, and we're glad to have her help. Hell, when we get t-shirts, I'll send her one. :) I just wanted to make sure that everybody's abiding by the license, which I don't think anybody disagrees with.

In short, I might be tactless or inarticulate, but I'm not evil. I hope that's clear to you, Kathy, and to Steven. And Richard, yes, yes, we're idiots and Joi is evil. But we didn't mean to harass Kathy. If any of you guys have suggestions for how we can make the license clearer or communicate it better, I'm all ears.