Another view on the MT upgrade

Posted on May 15, 2004 by Charles Kuffner

You know, if SixApart had had Jay Allen make the announcement about the MT 3.0 developer edition and various changes to the licensing agreements in the first place, I daresay they wouldn’t have had all these problems.

There’s now an update posted regarding the situation, which should also help. There are still questions to be answered, though, and Michael is asking some of them.

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3 Responses to Another view on the MT upgrade

  1. Alexis says:
    May 16, 2004 at 4:33 am

    $10 for every extra author/weblog seems pretty steep to me. And the fact that they’re bothering to backpedal in response to user community feedback suggests that this pricing structure isn’t just for 3.0D, as Jay seems to be suggesting.

  2. Alex says:
    May 16, 2004 at 5:25 am

    I agree with Alexis. Jay is spinning but I must admit that he is spinning pretty well. It is a developer edition, it is not the real thing, just wait for July!!! Who guarantees that we will not pay 100$ on July?

  3. Michael says:
    May 16, 2004 at 7:38 am

    Alex,

    I asked Jay that and he said that “this is dev pricing” was a guess on his part.

    Somebody in the 600+ trackbacks predicted that this would be the incident that changed how people think of MT from “Ben and Mena’s MT” to “SixApart’s MT”. There’s something to that. Jay knows them personally, and so for him, this is an issue to be resolved with Ben and Mena. But to the extent that it’s SixApart we’re dealing with, the letter of the license is a binding contract, so if we accept something in that, then we’ve accepted it.

    And $10 per additional author kills group blogs. We said “sure, why not?” when our friends wanted a group blog for writing about comic books. Neither they nor we want to spend $120 for their authors (nearly the cost of an expression engine license).

    This is not some hypothetical assh*le who sets up 50 of his friends in MT who should “pay more”. It’s me, a real, live assh*ole who is hit up for $408.25 for an upgrade because I’ve helped my friends. That’s not a reasonable price just to maintain the same usage I had with 2.6 and for which I donated $100 back when it was optional.

    I agree that Jay is doing a better job that Six Apart in terms of presenting their choices. I hope he’s right about Six Apart being willing to listen to users feel unfairly and unexpectedly overburdened by this upgrade price. I expect that his speculation about the temporary nature of this license was wrong. And while I hope the “fury” is quelled, I hope the reasoned critiques continue and that MT responds to them.

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