The New UserLand

UserLand has undergone a corporate transformation whereby the Frontier scripting environment code base is open-sourced and spun off into a different corporate entity than their weblog tools.

I'll bet that one of the motivators was so that the new UserLand would not be tied to stressing Frontier as its scripting environment any more than necessary. There is no business reason why their bogging software should have that restriction; it has to hurt more than it helps because there are a large number of great tools out there such as PHP, Python, and Ruby, a number of which are better than Frontier. Frontier does have some very nice features such as its object database. (Unfortunately, at least when I used the product, the object database was not really an object database in the technical sense referred to be real object-oriented programmers; still it is handy.)

As long as UserLand also had a business interest in the Frontier environment, it would look bad to take advantage of those other technologies. So that has arguably crippled UserLand competitively.

Hence it made business sense for UserLand's new CEO to make the split.

Update: Ah! I see that Dave Winer agrees, even if he won't say exactly why it "may have been" a liability:

But experience in the market said that, to succeed, UserLand didn't need to own its kernel. In fact, that it was the only developer using this kernel may well have been a liability for UserLand. [Dave Winer]