Month: May 2004

another faith-based initiative?

Revised pricing structure for Movable Type Personal Edition (kottke.org):

Six Apart is listening to their customers. Based on the specific concerns of their customers, they updated their pricing in just two days time. That Six Apart has sincerely listened to their customers in the past and continues to do so as a quickly growing company seeking to sustain itself is worth some goodwill on our part toward 6A.

Or they didn’t read through the license agreement as carefully as their customers did. An hour spent sitting at a table, reading it aloud, and reviewing it would have been of some value. Again, this license agreement is the basis of the ongoing relationship 6A hopes to have with its customers. To see it undergo revisions within 24 hours makes me wonder how well conceived it was in the first place.
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Bush v. Kerry is nowhere near as divisive

Jeremy Zawodny’s blog:

I never realized how many folks in the blog echo chamber were so cost-sensitive and willing to jump the gun and turn their backs on a fantastic piece of software.

Well, now I know. So much for loyalty. The judgment has been largely instant and harsh.

Yet another “If you have a problem with the new license terms, you’re a whining parasite” post.

Compare it with this:
Daring Fireball: Like a Lead Zeppelin:

But the people who are the most angry at Six Apart are people who are willing to pay for Movable Type, and are willing to accept license restrictions. Many of them donated, voluntarily, for previous versions.

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Brad Choate boils it down: Mark Pilgrim switches rather than fight

Brad Choate: Movable Type 3.0:

This means that if you are 1 author and you use 11 different weblogs to power your 1 web site, or even 300 weblogs to power your 3 web sites, you can use the free version. It doesn’t cost you $600. It doesn’t cost $1.

I have read over the stuff at SixApart, read over the comments and criticisms from both their defenders and the unloved masses, and I have not seen a simple distillation like this anywhere.

Again, I’m struck by the reiteration of how this license took months to develop, but only a day to remove stuff like the single CPU restriction. How do you miss that?

On the other hand . . . .
Freedom 0 [dive into mark]:

This site now runs WordPress. Thanks to the wonderful people on the #wordpress IRC channel, I was able to migrate almost all of my complex Movable Type configuration, including custom URLs (so permalinks shouldn’t break, and you won’t need to resubscribe to my syndicated feeds).

And I found his thoughts on where SixApart and MT worked well and not so well echoed my own:

It hit a certain sweet spot which is difficult to define but easy to recognize when it works. Also, it was light years ahead of its competition.

However, Movable Type stagnated while Six Apart grew and focused on other priorities, like TypePad. The limitations of Movable Type 2.6 were increasingly irritating, and I evaluated all of the available open source alternatives. I came away severely unimpressed. I decided to wait patiently for Movable Type 3.0.

I set up a test installation of WordPress last night on my iBook and the 5-minute install is pretty accurately described. I was able to set it up and import 1800+ entries and 1000+ comments in a minute or two. Looks great.

I haven’t decided to move yet: it’s not an easy decision to make. It’s not obvious to me what “MovableType-isms” I’ve become dependent on. I think dropping the css stuff that I have been using would be the Right Thing to Do, since it’s stock MT stuff.

ecto works just fine with WordPress (thanks, Adriaan): one less thing to worry about.

The bottom line hasn’t changed. I can stay with 2.661 awhile longer, evaluate 3.0 and WordPress side by side, and then see what works for me.

translation requested

The end of free (kottke.org)

Jason Kottke provides a post I can’t make any sense of whatsoever. He agrees with Dave Winer that people complaining about the new MovableType price structure are whiners. Then he makes reference to the fact that Six Apart is going to provide the same free software as they always have (eh? I need to re-read the announcement. I also saw a posting that you could still download 2.661, but I couldn’t find it and the poster hasn’t told me how he knows that).

Then he wanders into his own gripes about the pricing strategy . . . he has 10 weblogs and 22 authors, but “[b]y my reckoning, I’m one person using MT in a exclusively personal manner to maintain one Web site.”

He also suggests some counter-proposals: doesn’t that make him a whiner just like the rest of us?

I do have to give him credit for mentioning the community goodwill that seems to be where the whiners are feeling unhappy. And he suggests that 6A could have done/could still do a better job at finding how people use their stuff. That would be a good first step to building out a revenue model.

As I reflected on this tempest in a teapot today, it breaks down to how well 6A can build a company and serve a community or if they have to choose. My guess is they can do both — if they want to.

when is a new release not a new release?

The Collective Deep Breath

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.

[Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent]

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?
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the MovableType 3 imbroglio

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.
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odd but well-known Safari bug overwrites text in form

This is a pretty well-known bug and it, in all cases but just now, doesn’t really do anything.

What appears to happens is that Safari will appear to display the wrong text in a form’s text box. In MovableType [not to say this is a bug in MT: it’s just really easy to see it there ] this is easily reproducible: if you delete a comment, the comment’s text is displayed as the original entry text, but I have never seen it save that as the entry. Until just now.

Bad karma, I suppose, since I was so snarky about Timothy Appnel’s double-post: his duped comment was the one I deleted, and that put his comment text in place of my entry text.

Fortunately, since I compose posts in ecto, I could republish the original post. What a nuisance.

strange times when you get ripped for what you didn’t say

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: May 09, 2004 – May 15, 2004 Archives

Josh Marshall responds to a reader who complains about not seeing any mention of the Berg execution.

If he was as regular a reader as he claims, he wouldn’t need to have it spelled out that the execution, its filming, and distribution are evil and deplorable acts. I don’t think anyone would assume that realizing one has nothing to add on a subject is the same as tacit approval of it.
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