tima thinking outloud > O’Reilly: MT3 and a Balanced Diet.:
“To all of this, I can only say, they are a young company and are bound to make mistakes. I know that they are also razor sharp and have the good of this community at heart, so it won’t take them long to make these things clear.”
Agreed, which is why I think all of this outcry is a bit over the top.
Since this post links back to a comment made on my earlier post, I think some clarification is in order.
I’m not sure why the folks defending the MT3.0 payware decision are so surprised at the reaction of 2.x users who have been kept in the dark in 6A’s plans and now find that, after waiting for a feature release that would address some longstanding problems, they have formed expectations that 6A wasn’t prepared to meet.
There is some irony in that the fact that Tim Appnel, in his post to my weblog, double-posted his comments due to a combination of MT’s well-documented sluggishness and Safari’s misconfigured timeout interval (I sent him a link to fix the second problem). The snarky response is that perhaps he doesn’t care or notice when things don’t work well: I just found it underscored part of the problem nicely.
If 6A wants to go the platform route, it makes a lot of sense: it’s where software companies get their leverage. Doing it without being evil is tricky, but I’ll assume 6A can manage that with no trouble.
There’s nothing that says I or anyone else must upgrade to 3.0: we can stay with 2.x forever if we like. So there’s time for 6A to put some more thought into the licensing issue and see if they want to include the old 2.x users in their plans (bearing in mind that every successful MT site is an advertisement for them: they can surely make a guess as to how often sites are updated and readers are drawn to sites with their name in the credits).
What really hacks me off about the posts I see from defenders of MT (who certainly act as though they’ve been in the loop on a lot of this, something most MT users can’t claim) is how 6A has worked for months on the license and within a day there was all this negative feedback. Since when does how long you work on something have bupkis to do with how well you do it?
If I worked for months on something and it met with this kind of response from the people I hoped most to please (an assumption on my part), I’d be disappointed, angry, and embarrassed . . . at myself. I would take it as a failure to meet my community’s expectations. I would be disappointed for not learning more about how the product is used. I’d be angry that I didn’t think things through as well as I should have.