Product Management 101
Lauren Wood: Four basic rules. WordPress gets them right. Other products do too, even when they don’t have the same amount of support from a user community. Call it Product Management 101.
I'm on my third iteration of weblogging software and I left the first two because they violated the third rule in my opinion at the time, namely It looks like people still work on it. In the case of my second iteration of weblogging software, blosxom, my determination was clearly premature.
It is not just weblogging tools. I feel the same way about browsers. I started with OS/2 WebExplorer. Switched to Netscape when WebExplorer no longer actively being maintained. Switched to InternetExplorer when Netscape stopped being actively maintained. Switched to Mozilla when IE stopped being actively maintained. I'll switch again if Mozilla development sputters and stops.
Lauren's post is timely because a number of people were surprised by MovableType's recent licensing changes. Personally, I am entirely untroubled by MT's changes. At the moment, I don't pay for my software, but I do pay to have my weblog hosted. Only a portion of that is for hardware and bandwidth, the remainder is to have somebody other than me figure out why a RedHat update broke SMTP authentication on my machine.
Money well spent.