How obvious! And yet how hard to put into action. Why? Because trust is earned over time, with consistent, principled behavior that values long-term success over short-term profit. And trust is so easily trashed – one shortsighted decision, a few ill-conceived words, and you’re in the doghouse. Wreck your karma and you’ll be rebuilding that trust you so swiftly demolished, and maybe never getting it back.

I hear you saying “Yeah yeah of course! Developers trust us! We’re the good guys!” But are you? Turns out that the very things that developers look for as markers for mistrust are often the things you do to make money. And actions speak louder than words.

Remember Movable Type, the once popular blogging platform from Six Apart, Ltd.? Back in the day, MT was the bee’s knees. Six Apart had always offered a free version, allowed users to modify the code, hosted a public repository, encouraged contributions, patches, and plugins. They built a community of passionate developers and users who enthusiastically recommended MT to their friends, and helped create a groundswell of adoption. That is how it is supposed to work! Six Apart was the leader in blogging tools, launching TypePad (hosted blogging) and with leading market share in both self-hosted and hosted service blogs, because they were the good guys. Because they painstakingly had built their good karma.

Then on May 13, 2004, developers and users woke up to discover they’d been fooled. MT 3.0 was still free for one author and up to 3 blogs. More than that, and you had to pay. Whats wrong with asking for money for something valuable like blogging software? Nothing, unless you have built your large, enthusiastic developer and user base on a promise to make MT free, with source code, and then once they’ve adopted your platform you renege on that promise. MT 3.0’s passionate community felt duped. Their passion turned to scathing anger and disgust. They had trusted Six Apart, and that trust was destroyed with one ill-conceived decision, born of the need for Six Apart to monetize their hard work.

That’s bad karma.

With the 3.2 release, Six Apart restored an unlimited number of blogs for all licenses. With 3.3, MT was once again free for unlimited non-commercial use. Still not enough…. on December 12, 2007 Six Apart relicensed MT as Free Software under the GPL. But the damage was done.

Where did MT’s community go? Mostly to WordPress, which was far behind MT but rapidly caught up in features and sophistication. WordPress has been under the GPL license from day one. There are over 7000 plugins that extend it in almost any way imaginable. All plugins in their repository are GPL or compatible with GPL and open source. The WordPress community is enormous. Customizable themes can make WordPress sites look like almost anything you want (disclosure – I use WordPress for this site). WordPress is Free Software but the leading hosted WordPress service – wordpress.com – is run by Automattic, Inc., who’ve established a fast growing business built on making WordPress effortless for the non-technical blogging world. Automattic is a key contributor to the WordPress project itself which, with three releases/year is accelerating its innovative pace and developing an aura of cool as it is used by marquee Web 2.0 commentary sites like GigaOm and TechCrunch.

How is Six Apart doing now with their karma? A blog back in March 2008 by their chief evangelist, titled “A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide” opens with the line:

As you might know, WordPress 2.5 is about to be released, and we wanted to encourage WordPress users to upgrade. To Movable Type.

More bait and switch. This time, baiting WordPress users trying to upgrade with an article bound to pop up in search results. That kind of bare knuckle competition may seem like business as usual but in the developer world, where cooperation and community are valued above all else, it generates more bad karma. Many comments to the post had this flavor:

Comparing your product to a competitors by putting them down is not going to hold you in good stead (as I’m sure you’ve seen by now by the posts on TechCrunch and Twitter conversations), even though you might feel the need to make direct comparisons to pull people.

Another example, this time about Six Apart’s hosted service, TypePad in a comment to Mashable’s October 2009 “Blogging Faceoff: WordPress vs. TypePad” article (in which WordPress got an overwhelming 87%, TypePad 9%, and 4% called it a tie):

My big beef with TypePad is that, when I switched to WordPress, TypePad held my graphics hostage. They would not allow me to transfer them with the other content in my blog.

More bad karma.

But what does all this have to do with adoption? Does it really make a difference? See for yourself:

TypePad vs. WordPress.com (hosted blogging)

Movable Type vs. WordPress.org (blogging platform)

Ok, visitors doesn’t equate to platform adoption. But even the most jaded metrics maven would likely conclude from these statistics that WordPress in both cloud and platform versions is trouncing Movable Type.

If you think that platform adoption is critical to your ability to make money, you ignore your karma at your peril.

Thanks to Dalibor Topić for the example idea used in this post. Now there’s a dude who really has good developer karma!