Jay Allen, as ever, has much wisdom on l’affair du Type Movable. Those who strop and sigh should read his essay on The Collective Deep Breath.
I read through it. He suggests that there will be a user release similar to the 2.x product in the future.
Gee, do you think it would make any more sense for that to come from the company than from a developer?
It’s a developer’s release
Lastly, there is absolutely no reason for me to rush anything out the door, because this is a Developer’s release. It is not a feature release.
That’s right. You should not upgrade.
MT 2.661 is working fine for you, no? You have MT-Blacklist and all of your plugins work, no? No major bugs giving you the blues? Excellent! Stick with it and let us developers (both internal and external to MT) do our jobs to make the next version of MT the version that you want.
Well, no, MT 2.661 is not working fine. And no, MT-Blacklist doesn’t work in mod_perl environments. And no, I can’t rename the comment and trackback scripts in a mod_perl configuration because they seem to be hard-coded somewhere in MT’s innards. And it’s brutally slow. So a 2.7 or 2.8 release that addresses these issues as fixes, not as features, would be a good thing.
Then there’s the issue of why this is even called 3.0 if it’s not meant for the same audience as 1.x and 2.x. Why not call it the MovableType Platform or SDK or Toolkit, version 1.0, and avoid confusing us? So far, MT users have endured the birth of TypePad taking the focus off the established base then TypeKey that met with a decidedly mixed response and now a follow-on release that isn’t one.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, it would have made a lot more sense to offer a couple of different packages a year or more ago.
cloudy, chance of sun breaks: the folks at WordPress must be delighted:
Let’s see: if I have a full-featured server application and I make it available for free download for non-commercial use, how much money can I expect to make? How about nothing or damn close to it?OK, how about it if I have a couple of different bundles, one for hobbyists and non-commercial sites, and one for hosting services? The hobbyists can ride for free but the hosting services are a. going to charge for it, so we should make sure we get compensated and b. will provide a great source for feedback and performance testing. We need to work some kind of license deal with them to make it worth their while to work with us and allow us to collect performance metrics. That way, we can expand our reach without having to build out a hosted service of our own, or we could take the lessons we learn and apply them to a hosted service.
Hmm, that might work.
That seems like a reasonable and workable approach and it didn’t take me months to come up with it.
As for the new release, whatever it’s name and number work out to be, I’ll wait and see, as I have always planned to. I hope I don’t have to move, but that’s not all up to me.