So, the LiveJournal Social Contract has been renamed to 'guiding principles' in the wake of LiveJournal being sold. One of the most important points in both the original and new documents was that they promised to strive to run their business based on feedback from the LiveJournal community. This hasn't happened. They've sold it, and no-one had a clue. Not even paying users.

Now, the more interesting bit: they've changed various parts of the social contract (the important bit being the last bit), and the changes give us some insight into what Six Apart are planning (all formatting is mine):

• They changed 'We promise to keep you informed' to 'We will strive to keep you informed'. Minor change.

• They changed the end of 'permanent accounts will be honoured for the life of the site' to 'for the life of the service', as well as removing some unneeded text from the paragraph. Minor change.

• They changed the entire 'Avoid advertisements' section to 'Avoid banner advertisements', making the necessary changes to the text to match. So non-banner advertising is no longer out of the question. I wonder if this means we'll get textual advertisements?

• They massively expanded the 'we won't spam you' section to be more complete. They're now claiming that signing up establishes a relationship with them in which they're allowed to send spam, and that you have to opt-out. They've also moved from 'we won't sell e-mail lists or personal information' to 'we're not in the business of selling e-mail lists or personal information BUT <insert exceptions here>'.

  To be fair, some of this is to do with their need to be able to share information with their new parent company. However, the following is from their (brand new) privacy policy, and isn't good, but explains the other changes:

  LiveJournal.com may use or share your personal information where it is necessary for us to complete a transaction, to operate or improve LiveJournal.com and related products and services, to do something that you have asked us to do, or tell you of products and services that we think may be of interest.

  Where you are contacted with an offer or service based on information you have shared with LiveJournal.com, we will do our best to provide you with an opportunity to opt-out of receiving such further communications at the time you are contacted.

  Their old privacy policy said The only things we email you will be things you explicitly ask for (like a password reminder), mailing lists that you sign up for, or notifications about your account status.

• They completely gutted the Free Software section. It used to be:

  All of the code that is used to run a complete, highly-customizable LiveJournal installation is available to the public. We promise to keep this source free and open so that we can give something back to the Free Software community.

  They've gutted this to what is essentially the following: "We plan to continue to give back to the community by contributing certain bug fixes, testing, documentation and new code." .. the rest is babble about how they've contributed in the past.

So, goodbye, Free Software LiveJournal. It's pretty obvious from this and staff comments that they're not intending to carry on along their current almost entirely Free path. This isn't surprising, considering LiveJournal is now owned by .. the company who fucked up the whole Movable Type thing by suddenly charging insane prices for it (the blog entries linked from here on their site give a good overview of how pissed off people were about that). 'Yay'. I'm really really distrustful that it isn't going to be fucked up entirely.

To be fair, both Brad and Six Apart are claiming that livejournal will continue to be 'open source' in some manner. I suspect one of the reasons for this is that it's GPLed. And (I assume) many people have made code contributions under this license, and until they can replace the contributions with their own, any code changes they're going to have to distribute are probably going to have to be GPLed. This doesn't mean they can't customise the hell out of the site itself and not give out the source, of course (hell, they have been).

I also suspect they might end up losing many of the paying customers because of this. Not many free users, perhaps, but a lot of the users who actually cared enough to support Danga in the past won't bother doing so for Six Apart. I predict that, if so, they'll probably end up adding more benefits to having a paid account because of this, to try and encourage free users to move up, rather than just surviving on people who wanted to just support the site, who will disappear.

I certainly won't be renewing my paid account unless they move back to their old Free Software policy or otherwise show they're still committed to the idea. Thankfully it expires in February; quite a few of my friends are quite annoyed that they've paid for a whole year recently only to be betrayed like this.

I should probably say that I can completely understand Brad's likely reasons for selling out; I'd go insane trying to run a site like this when all I wanted to do was hack on it. This doesn't mean the above changes don't suck, and that LiveJournal isn't going to suck, it just means that despite what everyone is saying it's rather likely that the primary motivation here wasn't money.

Thoughts on alternatives: A post by crschmidt on greatestjournal discusses how greatestjournal have been stealing livejournal code they haven't been allowed to; the presence of this on their site, plus the broken state of various parts of their site and the fact they have banner ads in the middle of pages, means they don't seem like a viable alternative. Plus it looks like a horrible mess, especially their images system. deadjournal seems competently administered, but they want invite codes, and I can't pay for an account because they don't take credit cards, and paypal hate me.