Kottke points to what he calls a dumb /. thread on MT’s new pricing structure. I’ll admit that SNR on /. (everywhere really) is horrible (and slashbots are typically clueless [yet strongly opiniated of course] when it comes to web tech), but with the FoF and moderation filtering (increased to 5 now, sadly), I have to say, overall discourse isn’t that bad. I’ll almost never come out of a thread without seeing an insightful, informational, or eloquent argument, which is a hell of a lot better from most of my offline conversations. (I’ve added my preferences to the link (I think most people aren’t even aware the numbers are for filtering posts); sadly you can’t see my Friends/Foes list applied; I use it aggressively to flag posters who present interesting/informative posts — I would use it even more if it would do background passing of status changes, but that’s another issue entirely).
I’d been blowing off the whole licensing thing because well, it doesn’t really effect me. For my personal sites, I don’t use MT, at school, the Director of the Program is Joi Ito’s brother-in-law, so if licensing becomes a problem that’s probably near the bottom of the list, and at work (err, also at school), we would love (well, love may be too strong of a word) to pay for support, as we have rolled out a couple MT installations in limited production capacities [the single-cpu license clause has got to go; I don’t even think we have any single-CPU servers]). However, scrm’s post (referencing drunken monkey’s erm, critique touches on a very good point and made me very glad that I didn’t install the alpha or beta MT3 releases.
I’m not going to spew invective, because I like, know, and trust Ben, Mena, and Anil (but er, not the gawd knows how many other employees there are now), but hmm… it’s a pickle.
You ready a beta release of a piece of software, and ask people to beta test it. Mention nothing about paying, or even that you are considering changing the license. Being the loyal folks they are, lots say “OK” and you give them the software. They upgrade to it, and there’s no way to downgrade.
Then, about 5 weeks later, you say, “Oh, by the way, most of you will have to pay to upgrade out of beta”. Keeping in mind that most of the people who are the most loyal to MT, and therefore the most likely to have signed up for the beta program, are the ones who take MT to its’ limits by using multiple blogs for things like link sidebars, book reviews, photoblogs, etc., and a lot of them no longer qualify for the free version because of the three blog limit.
That’s pretty harsh. Given the timing, I’d be willing to give the benefit of the doubt and say that it probably just wasn’t well thought out (lots of easy ways to fix it). Or I guess you could just pin it on the evil VC? 🙂
See also: those who bought MT 2.6 commercial licenses
Note, I haven’t been following this closely enough to see if there’s going to be another non-developer edition released w/o the stupid author/blog limits for personal use, nor how the licensing is enforced
The reality is that they have effectively eliminated power users from the upgrade path by giving them three choices: a)dont upgrade, b) fork over what I feel is a fee bordering on extortion (my simple little personal site would have run hundred of dollars to upgrade), or c) become a criminal. These are the users who in some some cases have spent years extending MT and are among it’s most vocal supporters.
Adding insult to injury, to even download the thing now requires a TypeKey registration. Isn’t this directly contrary to SixAparts previous claim that TypeKey would not be required? Compounding this is the detail that sites running under the free license will no longer be reflected in the recently updated list something they failed to mention the times I voluntarily donated.
I have no problem paying for software and think that MT is worth the money, but I do feel the rug has been pulled out from under me. This is a major change that many of us were expecting to see in the vaporware MT Pro, not something we anticipated being part of what, in terms of functionality, is a minor point release.?