In the wee hours of May 13 2004, Movable Type 3.0 was released. In Mena's Corner Mena talks informally about the release, but there was nothing on SixApart's site until yesterday about the release.
As near as I can tell, the furor over the new licensing issues and everyone tracking back to Mena's entry crashed MT on SixApart's server (or perhaps the entire server) after about 79 trackback pings. Apparently the site wouldn't even display, but that may have been due to slashdotting. At the time of this writing, all pages on SixApart and MovableType are back up, with Mena's original blog entry having 681 trackbacks, and the SixLog entry having 227. That's a lot of comments, folks (I've added mine to the mix too).
What's really interesting is watching the transition of SixApart from a company that develops cool stuff because it's cool and people really like it, to a company that's being asked to give a return on investment, or else, and having it all come out in a period of about 4 days. After all, SixApart did take outside financing, so they've had to give up their soul... was that my outer voice? I meant "control". Silly me!
I honestly have no idea how much money the Trotts were making off MT services and TypePad. My feeling (and this is from knowing them only from their blogs, and perhaps reflecting my own feelings about how a business ought to be run) is that they're not looking to get rich, they're looking to make their lives better by making others lives better. Witness several of SixApart's recent hires, all of whom have been rabid volunteer supporters of MT and its community. But I suspect that others have seduced(or forced) the Trotts into changing those views (at least publicly).
Outside financing doesn't care about anything that can't be measured on this quarter's balance sheet.
In their defense, SixApart rapidly modified the pricing structure and several license clauses. It may be too little too late, but only time will tell there. A little worrisome is the statement that "[the] single CPU usage statement was not intended to be in the license." Well, how did it get in there in the first place? SixApart (I'm being very careful to differentiate SixApart from the Trotts) hasn't been too great in its business savvy recently (a la TypeKey) and that's culminated in what's appearing to be an alienation of their core user base.
So let me sum up rather abruptly: I hope Ben and Mena make a boatload of money, and can continue doing something they love and creating something that makes others lives better. I don't think I'll be upgrading to 3.0, but I don't think I'll be moving the blog software to another platform anytime soon either. And one more think: I don't think I'll be using MT for CMS on the CRMA sites either, and that was a non-profit license for SixApart.
Update: I despair of ever being able to express myself as clearly as Mark Pilgrim does. "Free enough", indeed.
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[...] nt — john @ 10:41 pm This site now runs on WordPress. As I’ve discussed here and here, I am uncomfortable with MT’s new licenses. I [...]
Actually, just to clarify, the MT site went down due to our forums; It was just unfortunate timing.
[...] @ 9:01 am This site now runs on WordPress. As I’ve discussed here and here, I am uncomfortable with MT’s new licensing t [...]