Movable Type goes 3.0, farts in your general direction
So, SixApart has just announced Movable Type 3.0, dubbed it “Developers Edition”, switched to a ridiculously steep pricing sheet, and expressed their commitment to a free version. Wonderful, ain’t it?
“Free version.” As Shelley Powers expressed it, “One of the reasons people haven’t moved to Wordpress or other weblogging tools is lack of support for multiple weblogs–yet.”
Take that advantage away (many MT users have more than three weblogs, and are not the only author) with MT 3.0, and there you have to use multiple free versions of MT, on which you must remain the only author. At the moment, you must install multiple WordPresses if you want to handle multiple blogs, but at least you don’t have to pay extra cash if you’re handling multiple users.
“Developers Edition.” Yeah, SixApart can thank third-party developers for doing all the innovation for them these past two years.
It’s cynical how in such an innocent title, SixApart symbolised their relationship with plug-in developers: you code for free, we rip the profits.
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Disclaimer: As a WordPress developer, I’m not exactly unbiased. But trust me, I tried to be objective in this post. Had I done it in a subjective way, expletives would have littered the screen to express my digust at SixApart for such a blatant disregard of their users’ expectations.
4 responses
The Movable Type Shitstorm
So Movable Type 3 is out, and there are a lot of unhappy campers out there. Main complaints: Too expensive for no real updates. There’s also a lot of “making money off of volunteer labor pool” kinda comments. Witness the…
#1 joe mullins dot com — 2004/05/13 at 20:01
Wordpress forever =)
#2 GaMerZ — 2004/05/13 at 20:29
Thank God I switched to Wordpress when I did. I had over 3 blogs with MT and was actually able to consolidate 2 of them into one when I switched, thanks to the Media Manager Hack.
#3 Rayne — 2004/05/14 at 20:02
I sympathize. I remember trying out MT and nearly gagging. It was disorganized, too, too, too bloated, and then it started wanting payments.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand why developers move to pricing scripts. Scripting isn’t easy, and what was new and great this month may not be good for the next month; development is time consuming. Nevertheless, one thing that really, really pisses me off is when a company doesn’t just come out and be honest.
Let’s all be truthful. Before you ever make it ‘big’ with your company and your product, you know if you’ll ever be asking money for it. Might as well start out like that, I think, rather than throwing it on all the dedicated users you’ve had. You know from the beginning whether you’re going to be a staunch supporter of open source software and scripting or just another company.
I guess MT has seen that and decided to do this free version again (they had removed the old, free version, right?–I stopped keeping up, really).
WordPress forever, I say.
#4 Lelia Katherine Thomas — 2005/08/21 at 5:53
Your words