Plum Blossoms

The most thoughtful piece I've seen so far is Danah Boyd's Salon article, "Turmoil in blogland". It addresses the issue that LiveJournal is an online community, not just a blog host, and the Six Apart culture might not understand that distinction.

Having read the article and some other post-merger analysis, I feel that, to some extent, that merger skeptics seem to be a bit unfair to the LiveJournal team. Some of it (though not Boyd) smacks straight of the Movable Type 3.x license fiasco, which made a lot of people look like jerks for proclaiming their self-conceived "right" to freely use Six Apart's intellectual property.

Boyd's piece centres on the fact that LiveJournal serves as an agora for social misfits and subcultures, a safety net for those who usually would have none. I sympathize with her view, but for LiveJournal to serve as such a meeting place, it must have a strong sense of legal awareness to protect itself, lest one user bring down the whole damn thing. As Brad wrote in the merger announcement:

Why is the TOS and privacy policy changing?
Our old TOS and privacy policies apparently sucked, from a lawyer point-of-view. We never had lawyers create or really even review the old ones... they were just a hodge-podge of misc lawyer-sounding things people had collected over time. A lot of the things that were changed are actually now better for the users. We just needed to clean things up.

Our goal isn't to really change anything with the new documents... just make them legally correct.

We're putting up the new documents now so you have time to review them and compare them to the old ones. In a few days (to be determined) you'll be required to agree to the new Terms of Service before logging in or posting, etc. Sorry for the inconvenience ... it's a lawyer thing.

The community that Boyd describes would be on thin ice if the legal situation remained as Brad describes it.

Another assumption is that Brad and the Danga team could've kept LiveJournal going as an independent effort. From what I've read, I doubt that this would be the case, or that it would be fair to the Danga team had it been the case. The biggest effect of keeping LiveJournal independent would likely be a retardation in continued development of the platform:

Why is Danga selling LiveJournal?
I love technology and designing the LiveJournal architecture but I hate running a business. While I've been learning a lot of business stuff over the past 5 years and it's been kinda interesting, I just don't love it and I'm not great at it. Plus it just keeps getting harder as LiveJournal grows, sucking away more of my time and youth. I'm ready to pass off what I see as "the boring stuff" to somebody else that I trust and focus on the fun stuff.

Also, Six Apart has a lot of staff that we don't... marketing, designers, usability people, etc. It's been frustrating the past few years knowing that in a number of ways LiveJournal is technically the best but because we weren't the prettiest and didn't give good quote, we were often overlooked. I want that to change ... we'll continue to focus on technology and they'll help us make our stuff pretty and usable. They want LiveJournal to stay LiveJournal and that's why I picked Six Apart.

Other, more mundane fears, of the "They're-gonna-force-us-into-TypePad-and-charge-outrageous-moolah-and-force-us-into-slavery" sort, are pretty much addressed by Mena and Brad; it's apparent that both parties know what they're doing and that the status quo will likely remain the same for some time.

Let's not forget that, in the worst case scenario, groups will probably just run their own LiveJournal servers for themselves and for others. The software, after all, is open source, and people will adapt.

On another note, I notice that Mena's still got some of the old steam from the MT3 license shouting match:

About the Open Source issue: We made a decision to not GPL Movable Type or TypePad. That doesn't mean we don't believe in the Open Source movement. If you look at Ben's contribution to CPAN for the past four years, you can see this commitment (one that is shared by our staff at Six Apart). Religious wars about licensing are about as useful as religious wars in general. There is a happy medium and we believe that with LiveJournal, Six Apart has reached this nice middle-ground.

(Emphasis is mine.)

I personally am quite happy with this deal. I've always had a sense of respect for LiveJournal. It's a technically impressive platform and attracts thoughtful people. Although I never joined, I held it in higher regard than Xanga, which I joined only because most of my personal friends used it. For example, notice that I blogroll LiveJournal users, but not Xanga blogs.

Six Apart has a history of keeping up with its users. Their quick response to the confusion over the MT3 license and the rapid development of MT in the 3.x era speaks volumes. I expect nothing less in LiveJournal's future.

I wish the Six Apart and Danga teams, as well as all LiveJournal users, the best in this strange new world.

UPDATE (2005/01/12 0148PST): Evan Martin (with many LJers who replied) gives excellent arguments for why the 6A-LJ union will work, and show how close Brad came to pulling the plug on LJ altogether.