Six Apart has announced new pricing for MT version 3.0 and I am quite happy with their decision. Having put my money where my mouth is I had already purchased an upgrade. I strongly believe that Six Apart has a long term vision for the product and having programmers on the payroll who are focused and have a team vision.
The WordPress vultures are still on the prowl commenting on almost all articles about the MT licensing issues. With Six Apart set to fast track improvements to MT it will only be a mater of a few months before the product overtakes and leaves in the dust the remaining competition. [Six Apart]
Shortly after the initial announcement, I converted my primary weblog to WordPress from MT. Last week, I started a project with TextPattern. Two days ago, I bought an unlimited personal license for MT. And last night, I started another project in the Nucleus offshoot, BLOG:CMS.
I still think the power and flexibility of MT is unrivaled. But as I have discovered over the last month, there are alternatives out there that are worth exploring if only to learn new techniques to use with MT.
Six Apart has made a positive step toward resolving the situation. But I am no longer comfortable leaving all my eggs in a single basket. I don’t think that makes me or anyone else a Vulture.
I used MT since version 1.something. I loved it and I got friends to use it too. The original licensing plan sent an enormous portion of the MT community packing including me. I’ve moved on to WordPress not because it’s free but because it’s GPL and like other true Open Source products, there is a great energy level in the community. I am not going to argue whether or not it is a better product, because in my opinion they both have serious flaws.
This new pricing scheme is a lot more pleasant than the original one but I asked myself a couple of basic but essential questions, namely whether or not Six Apart had done anything to really solve the comment spam issue. They haven’t. Having people log in (Typekey) will of course discourage random acts of comment spam, but it’s also prohibitive to people who don’t want to manage yet another login. Personally I don’t want to login to post a comment on a blog so why would I force that on my readers? How could I then rationalize spending a lot of money for something that doesn’t effectively solve my current problems, and there was no guarantee that that licensing fee would guarantee upgrades beyond a certain point? Furthermore, I feel that Six Apart could have done a better job out of the gate with the pricing scheme if they had looked at the community that used their product. Yes there are a few commercial entities that use it, but there are also a myriad of students that use it. Initially there was no special pricing for educators/students and as a student on a limited budget I was insulted after participating in that community for so long. That’s why I walked, plain and simple.
I think MT has a hard road ahead because they alienated a large portion of their user base, but I can’t begrudge them for wanting to turn a profit. I think their product has a lot of potential, but it’s not the best product out there and the way they alienated their user base will most likely result in the birth of other products that will compete with both MT and WordPress.