MT promises.
I'm kind of surprised myself at the firestorm that the MT 3.0 release has engendered. There are two camps:
1. Jesus Christ, you want money for this?
2. Jesus Christ, you want this for free?
Both are falling into pretty predictable patterns. Camp 1 - well, I'm not really sure what to say about Camp 1. These are the same people who throw a fit when Apple charges for OS upgrades. Well, kids, the writing has been on the wall a loooong time. We all knew that the Trotts were eventually going to charge for MT, and anyone keeping even half an eye on the expansion bender the company's been on lately can't be that surprised by the announcement.
Camp 2 tends to be comprised entirely of developers, who quite naturally, are scared by people demanding software for free. This is the "developers gotta eat" rationale, and these are the same people who snort "Apple is a business" at Camp 1. They make the same mistake I often see in "entrepreneurs" - that your goals are the same as the customer's goals. People will generally pay for software, but you can't act like their goal is to see SA flourish - what they want is to publish their blog, remember?
So. Which camp? Well, neither, really. Six Apart have every right to make money off their software. My own situation, as a corporate developer, is different from the Trotts, but hell, I am hardly against a developer making a buck. So what's the problem then?
It's this: Six Apart makes pretty damn good software, but they absolutely suck at customer management. Given the history of MT over the past year, the way they handled this release guaranteed the shitstorm now howling around the company. There had been no major release of MT for almost a year. I can remember 2 relatively minor bugfix releases that addressed minor issues, but no new functionality in almost a year.
No new functionality from Six Apart, that is. During that time, the MT developer community shot up like a weed, and for the most part was the major source of innovation for the product. Comment spam happened. Mt-Blacklist happened.
Where was Six Apart? Off on that expansion bender, fueled by VC cash and the TypePad launch. The power user/dev community was already getting pissed off at SA long before the 3.0 licensing announcement - all the company's resources seemed to be directed at TypePad to MT's detriment. The developers really saved the company's ass by rushing in to fill the vaccuum left by the TypePad launch. Nothing from the company as to the state of the next MT release, or the timetable for the MT Pro release. We are told that MT 3.0 will be a significant, free release.
So after a long period of utter silence (ostensibly spent building business infrastructure) Six Apart begins to make some noises about starting up MT development again. First comes the announcement that MT 3.0's only real new functionality will be the TypeKey service, which is neither specific to MT nor necessarily welcomed by the user base. In essence, it is not a feature release at all.
Followed by what seems to be an extremely short beta, and then yesterday's announcements - that 3.0 will not be a free release. There is a free version, but that's really a different thing. And I really don't understand what's going on with the "honor system" thing. It's an attempt to play it both ways, to both claim there's limits and no limits. No, the software won't stop me from doing the right thing, but you want me to do the right thing.
And they flubbed the pricing structure completely. What you want in a situation like this is to make it easy for the little guy to use your software cheaply and freely, while making sure that corporate clients pay much more for the much greater use they're going to get out of it. This is what I think when Mena referred in the announcement to their work being "exploited," and I think it's a valid concern. But the pricing structure is a mess. Much of the confusion and upset in the community is due to the fact that it's confusing and hard to understand. So I can use the "developer" version, but I am limited to one author, 3 blogs, but the software won't hold me to that, or I can buy a license for the "personal" version, with its own set of limits, or...it needs to be much simpler.
Also, ironically for a company selling communications tools, the communication on this one has been terrible. The previously mentioned silence, the release at 4am, the snarky 'Let the complaining begin" on Anil's link blog. It's as though SA was expecting the shitstorm, which should have told them something.
Plus, one other thing I wanted to mention. Now that you're charging money for it, the "unpack the tarball and start cp'ing stuff around" installation procedure just became completely unacceptable. The lack of an installer is a glaring flaw in the product, and "it's free" is now no longer an excuse.
As for myself, I'm thinking about what to do. The new plugin architecture sounds like it could be interesting to hack on, but I'm not sure that's reason enough to actually spend money on an upgrade. Like so many others have said, 2.6 is good enough for now, though that whole "Your blog's not about to disappear" line gets a bit tedious. I'm probably going to wait and see how the situation shakes out.