It’s the second day since the release of MT3.0D, and the griping, whining and bitterness continues. Over 350 trackbacks to Mena Trott’s announcement. So far, not a peep out of 6A since the announcement. I hope they’ve got good shields to deflect some of the hostility being directed at them.
To the 6A folks:
Wait a little bit for some of the hubbub to die down, but don’t wait too long. Plenty of users are already frustrated with 6A about the lack of communication over MT. Give your users a well thought out response and any plans on addressing some of your users’ concerns. Drop the prices on your PE licenses. Show us you’re listening and want us to keep using your excellent product. I don’t mind paying. Lots of MT users don’t mind paying. You’re just asking us to pay too much.
3 days ago, I was invited to join the beta testing program for MT3.0. Downloaded and installed 3.0b4 the next day. The day after, I learned that MT3.0D was released. Now, I’m not a developer, but if I were, I wouldn’t be inviting more beta testers to test a product 2 days before it’s released.
I’ve spent many more hours than I probably should have reading posts, weblog entries and comments about people’s feelings on the matter. One item in particular from Mena’s post caught my eye.
We would recommend that, if you’re not the type of person who likes to tinker with Movable Type or would require a installation, you hold off until the general release.
So, does that mean that MT3.0D is intended primarily for MT plugin developers? Is there going to be another release, perhaps with different license conditions for regular users, or a different feature set?
Since there doesn’t appear to be any hardcoded enforcement of user/weblog limits with the free edition (I’ve not dug into the source code to confirm this though), 6A is trusting the MT community to follow the license restrictions on their own.
We’re big on honor at Six Apart. We haven’t built in any nagware for license violations or phone home mechanisms. We trust our users’ good judgment and intentions. We intend to use our good judgment in being flexible about enforcing these limits.
In that, I think the free edition has become something of a shareware product, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Use it, if you like it, then pay for it. Problem is, I think they’re just asking us to pay too much for it.
Update: The hubbub has even reached Slashdot.org now!
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I have been thinking the same thing too, that the pricing is for people who are supposedly making money off of Movable Type. The problem is that the developers of plugins aren’t making money. Look at MTBlacklist for a perfect example.
Probably the most-used plugin, the most essential one for 2.x, without which we would spend the bulk of our days deleting comments (with the old interface which is not meant for deleting dozens of spam comments (I got six spam blocks from MTBlacklist last night alone), and the guy is literally making no money at all off of it. At one time he was, but now he isn’t. He probably can’t even afford a personal license for his blogs (I think he maintains several, maybe more than the magic three) from the donations he gets because he certainly can’t make a living off of it.
If he can’t make a living off of the most necessary, most used plug in, then how could anyone else possibly do so? I can see charging corporate users, from what I’ve read, they don’t mind too much, but even some of them are griping. IT budgets aren’t exactly overflowing these days.
I really hope this is another major communication failure on the part of Six Apart, but I fear that the non-developer version will have much the same restrictions. Or maybe “Developer Version” is just another name for “Early Adopter” version and for people willing to wait for 3.01, a new license that is much like the old one that relied on donations, or a license that restricts us to no more than say, 5 authors and 5 blogs (but I doubt they’ll be even that generous).
I dunno, there is just so much fear, uncertainty and doubt out there and unfortunately it really only can be laid at Six Apart’s door. I really fear that I won’t be able to use Movable Type anymore. I’m so glad I saved the tarball for 2.661, but how long until that becomes “unsupported” and maybe a security hole is found and goes unfixed? Or not found except by the wrong people.
I want to find a way to think positive about this and I hope that there will be a non-developer version announced in the future and not TypePad. I can’t afford TypePad and I get free web space from a friend at an ISP, so I can only use an open sourceish content management system. Maybe I’ll have to move to PHP Nuke or one of the other options, but nothing out there really thrills me. I started with Movable Type and that’s what’s familiar to me, so I want to keep using it.
I hope Six Apart finds a way to let me.
(Sorry for the long post, I’m just about to burst and thanks for letting me vent a bit here.)