It’s not easy to find much “hard” information on what just happened with MT licensing (SixApart’s web site is far from a masterpiece of information architecture), so I’ve mostly been reading commentary on various blog posts. (I found out about it because of a trackback from scribblingwoman to my MT courseware post.)
It’s not clear to me if the new charges will apply to users of pre 3.0 versions of MT. If so, that means everyone using my courseware for more than one class—including me—is pretty much screwed. And since I’m not willing to pay a licensing fee of $150 to use MT for the handful of family members on lawley.net, this probably will result in my migrating both my personal and my professional weblogs to another platform. (Let me add that I am willing to pay for MT; I’m just not willing to pay that much.)
From what I can see, regardless of how it all shakes out in terms of licenses and wording, this was a major screwup by SixApart in terms of communication and respect for their users. I’m deeply disappointed. And since I genuinely like and respect the Six Apart team—especially Anil and Joi, who I know well and think of as friends—I’m doubly surprised by the clumsiness of this move. As Simon Phipps points out, the response to Mena’s post announcing the changes is a sobering demonstration of the power of trackback to make unhappy customers’ voices heard. I imagine that a lot of companies will take this as a cautionary lesson about the negative impact of corporate blogs and the conversations they foster. I’m also disappointed by the company’s failure to quickly respond to the outcry from their user community—the longer they stay silent on this, the more likely it is that they’ll lose formerly committed users to competitive products.
Meanwhile, however, courseware users need not panic…I’ll probably spend some time next month looking at WordPress and TextPattern (which seem to come highly recommended by bloggers whose viewpoints I trust) to see if I can create one or more new versions of my courseware on those platforms (I can’t imagine it would be that difficult to migrate the courseware).
I’ll also add a Creative Commons license to the courseware templates and documentation, so that if anyone else wants to shift them elsewhere, they can.
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Update: I’ve heard from Anil that there will be a very reasonable educational license provided, and that details will be announced soon. Once that happens, I’ll write more about the future of MT courseware and my educational use of the product. I know Six Apart is committed to encouraging educational uses of their products, so I’m hoping that the educational license(s) they announce will be fair and appropriate.
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