So what do they want for their money?

Not SixApart. The blogging community.

Timothy Appnel opines that the Net crowd is bunch of cheapskates for bitching about MT’s new licensing scheme. Noting that the common wisdom was that 6A were getting abuot $0.50 per copy of MT out there, he continues:

As a developer and one who makes a living writing code, this reaction to Six Apart’s new licensing is really disheartening and on a certain level frustrating to see. I am a firm believer and backer of open source. I’ve personally released quite a bit of open source code myself and will continue to do so. However this apparent expectation of the vocal part of community that it is their right to have all great works of software at no cost is bothersome. If users don’t have the funds or won’t pay on principle for my time, effort or talent – how do I eat?

Fair enough. While there’s a certain measure of WAR3Z SHOULD BE FREEEEE! in some quarters of the reaction. I’d say the issue for more thoughtful observers is not free/not-free, but cost-benefit, and a sudden change in what one has to pay in order to get what has been free.

Were this the oft-rumored MT Pro release, few folks would cavil at these prices for that version. Indeed, people would be drooling and wondering how they could scrape the shekels together to pay for it.

But this isn’t MT Pro. 6A admits that. The biggest change in MT3 is what’s under the hood, waiting to be exploited. MT 3.1 will likely be The Big Release.

And it’s more than that. For a version that, to the naked eye, is not much more than a maintenance version, not only are MT blog owners being asked to pay, they’re being asked to settle for less. Deep restrictions on numbers of blogs, and numbers of authors< are actually removing profound functionality from the tool — for which we now need to pay significantly more.

If GM suddenly said, “Hey, we’re changing the sales structure of our 2005 vehicles. Now you can drive by yourself for the same price you’ve been paying; if you are going to have a passenger, you need to pay 50% more, and if you’re going to fill up the back seat, that’ll be 200% more” — well, folks would be ticked off, and GM sales would plummet.

I repeat: if an unlimited Personal Edition of MT were going for $50, I’d consider that a good deal. If it included a bunch of keen new features, I might pony up still more.

But telling me I can only keep up with the free version, for few immediate benefits, by taking away key functionality (blogs, authors), or that I can pay some hundreds of dollars for a pretty new version of the more-or-less same software — that’s irksome. And unreasonable.

I want SixApart to be healthy and happy. I want MT to continue to evolve and progress. I want the blogging community to use MT. Sure, some folks may have done that because it was free and easy, but that’s no sin. I want them to be able to keep doing so (and for those with small-scale setups, they still can, sans support options — for the moment, anyway).

But the best and most interesting and useful implementations of MT have come from people with multiple blogs, and/or with multiple authors. That’s no longer possible without being willing to drop a substantial chunk o’ change. It’s not a matter of being unwilling to pay anything — it’s being faced with paying too much for what is (for the vast majority) a personal hobby. If spiral binders jumped from a couple of bucks to $50 a pop, would people be “cheap” if they stopped keeping their diaries in them?

And, ultimately, Appnel’s comment is the opposite side of that basic economic equation of what the market will bear. If what you’re doing isn’t worth enough for people to pay what you’re asking for it, that’s not necessarily their fault. It may be that you’re pricing it too dearly. And if you can’t make a living that way, that means those people are going to be SOL anyway, because you won’t be able to do it. That’s life. But I wouldn’t expect you to be happy about it, any more than I’d expect MT customers to be happy about this, either.

(via Lea at Les)

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, Les echoes my sentiment beats me to the punch saying much the same things I’ve been saying.