Although not in any way an official statement from SixApart, Jay Allen offers some thoughts and insights on the release of MT3.0D. And some very good thoughts too. Good words, Jay.
MT3.0D Day 2
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!
Typekey and commenting
The last gamma camera
At long last, almost 3 years after the initial purchase, our final gamma camera has been delivered and installed. Joining our department is a new Philips/Adac Argus Epic single head gamma camera which will do a good portion of our routine and planar imaging, particularly for patients coming down in hospital beds.
Tomorrow I should be able to get in and do the acceptance testing on the unit. Looking forward to it. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything on an Argus. Should be pretty easy this time. Only two sets of collimators and one head to do.
MT. Bash. Duck. Wow
Wow, a lot of bitterness, griping and bashing going on with the release of MT 3.0D.
There are a lot of angry people out there ranting about SixApart’s (SA) new licensing scheme and pricing for MT3.0. Some of it I think goes a little over the line, but the majority of it seems to question the wisdom of SA’s actions.
Personally, I think if they made the pricing scheme a little more reasonable (ok, a lot more reasonable) and simpler, it would go a long way to making people feel better. However, I think it’s going to make a lot of people abandon MT as a weblogging platform.
In the meantime, I downloaded and set up the free version of MT and pointed it at my existing database. It unpacks itself as MT-3.0D-full-personal-en_us and as far as I can tell so far, any user/weblog restrictions seem to be on the honour system. In fact I made this entry using the free version using a database with 5 authors and 6 weblogs. No complaints either when I created a 7th test weblog.
So, SA people, if you are listening (if anybody is listening), I think MT3.0 is great. I have no problem with paying for a Personal license for MT. I just think your pricing scheme needs to be changed to make it more affordable. Drop the cost of the Personal Edition license by half and you’ll have another paying customer.