I've been reading responses to SixApart's new MT 3.0 release and licensing policy. I pretty much figured I could hold my tongue, until I read several of Timothy Appnel's posts (here, here, and here, in chronological order of posting). I think Timothy, along with many others spinning on SixApart's behalf, miss the point, and I have to speak out about it: SixApart lied to their users with the intention of locking them into a proprietary tool.
Harsh words? Maybe. I've never met the Trotts, but from everything I've read, they're nice people who genuinely care about MT and the community that's sprung up around it. But from the moment they accepted outside financing, "Ben and Mena" no longer equated to Movable Type. SixApart did, and SixApart wasn't just Ben and Mena anymore.
Then again, I know lots of nice people who will cut your throat in a business deal. "It's not personal," they'll murmur. "It's just business."
To back up my point about the lie, here's Ben Trott talking about the upcoming 3.0 feature list and beta release:
The next version of Movable Type will be version 3.0, a significant and free upgrade.
and in the same entry,
Movable Type 3.0 will be a free download and upgrade.
Nothing about the draconian authoring and weblog limits. Nothing to show that the suggested donation of $20 is now a mandatory license of $70 (down from $100 in less than 48 hours). Nothing about the requirement to register with TypeKey before you can download anything at all. Unless your idea of "significant upgrade" is "lots more for me, not much more for you", these statements are lies, bait-and-switch advertising, or sins of omission. Take your pick.
Who knows, maybe the folks at SixApart have been drinking too much of the marketing Kool-Aid. It's happened before, and I imagine it's a seductive trap for corporate newbies: if you say something enough times, does that make it true?
I want to reiterate a point in my last post. I wish SixApart the best of success. I hope they all make boatloads of money, if that's what they want (I guarantee that's what their VC investors want). I hope they can make it work.
But it's not about being cheap. It's about getting brought up short from a company lots of bloggers felt like they had a personal relationship with; a cold smack from the wet halibut of reality. And when those folks say, "that's it, I'm leaving, never again" it's because of the old saying, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice" (all together now, with feeling) "shame on me". MovableType was never open source, and a lot more people know that now. A lot more people realize what happens when they don't use open source; when they depend on the goodwill of a corporate entity.
I have personal experience with this type of corporate goodwill. In 1998, my company decided to move to an object-oriented database technology for all its new software development. Being a Microsoft shop, we went with J++. Within two years, Microsoft ceased all development of its JVM. We went through a costly development effort to translate our J++ middle tier (with its Microsoft-specific libraries) to Sun Java, and made a commitment for "never again". But then came .NET and the coming end-of-life of VB6 (all our front ends are VB6). Our choices were to move towards a J2EE architecture for our products, or move to VB.NET and C#. Three different groups (in a company of about 40 developers), over a 12-month period, came to the same conclusion: J2EE is not only the best from a technology standpoint, but from a flexibility standpoint. Six years later we're still transitioning, but it's happening, and when VB6 is EOL'd, we won't be dependent on Microsoft products any more.
And before you say that Java's not Open Source, it's still a standard, and compilers and JVMs are available from multiple vendors. .NET only comes from Microsoft, and MovableType only comes from SixApart (to segue back to my original topic).
I don't think users are balking at the cost. I think they're balking at the price.
Before I get off this horribly long-winded soapbox, I have to take issue with the "ya gotta eat!" crowd. I'm a developer myself. If I want to keep doing it for a living, I have to figure out how to get paid. But let me offer up a few examples from my Quick Launch toolbar of free software (in the speech and beer senses), and their proprietary alternatives:
* Mozilla Firefox, web browser (IE6)
* Mozilla Thunderbird, mail client (Outlook/Outlook Express)
* SciTE, text editing (Notepad, EditPad, TextPad, a host of others)
* Python, scripting and general RAD (VBScript, VB, Delphi)
* Gimp, image editing (Photoshop)
* Eclipse, Java/PHP/C++/Python/XML IDE (Visual Studio.NET, JBuilder, others)
* Filezilla, FTP client (WS_FTP, CuteFTP, others)
Moving over to my task bar, I've got:
* Gaim, IM client (AIM, Yahoo IM, MSN)
* Apache, web server (IIS)
* MySQL, database server (Access, SQL Server, Oracle)
And that doesn't even count PHP (ASP), CVS (Visual Source Safe), and Bugzilla (Rational); tools that I use every day as a developer. I get paid as a developer for being highly productive; these are the tools that help me get there. The cost of the proprietary alternative used to be acceptable until the price became too high. I learned my lesson about software development tools, and now I've learned it about my web log tool too.
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5 responses so far ↓
The issue is not price per se. It's value for price. Right now there is no compelling reason for the average user to upgrade except for the fact that if they don't do it now, it will cost more to upgrade in the future. Maybe you can get away with that if you're Microsoft, but not if you're a startup like SixApart.
I would be quite willing to shell out $ for MT above and beyond what I have already paid if I had more information as to whether or not it's a step worth taking. Right now I don't have enough data to make a decision.
As a former product manager, I understand very well the perils of going public with your feature roadmap. But given the depth of the PR hole that SixApart has dug for itself, they would do well to show some good faith to their users and be more forthcoming about what the future will hold for MT licensees.
Lux,
I may not have made the "cost" versus "price" difference clear. "Cost", to me, is the license fee (in this case). "Price" is more like Total Cost of Ownership. Any TCO analysis has to take into account the potential costs of staying with the product, as well as migrating away from the product.
MT 2.x's cost was free; it's price was around $20 (a bargain by anyone's measure). MT 3's cost to me is $70, and it's price is UNKNOWN (what's to stop them from charging a yearly subscription fee?).
All that to say we're saying the same thing.
The Great Blogtercation of 2004 : Or on social networks and data mining
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