Geodog

Mena Trott answers 6A's critics and Geodog signs off on criticism

I wasn't planning on ever writing anything about SixApart and MovableType again, but today Kris Krug sent me mail alerting me to a lengthy interview he did with Mena Trott, where she responds to some of the recent criticism of Six Apart and the MT 3.0, and 3.1 releases:

MT: One of the biggest things that I want to get through (and that I probably don't a good enough job of getting through) is that it's completely untrue that we're this big corporate company and that we don't care about the users-that it's all about just Ben and Mena and the venture capitalists. It's not so; there are so many smart people here who love what they're doing and love blogging. It dismisses their value when people say the company is just a big corporation that doesn't care about its users.

People should understand that when you're insulting the company, you're insulting a lot of people. We're all good people and I wish everyone would take some time to see that. There are so many other targets to focus on; our little company from San Mateo is the least among them.

The interview is worth reading in its entirety, if you are interested in the whole MovableType saga and some of the issues around the recent releases. To round out the view, or if you want a different perspective, check out long time MT user Ben Hammersley's opinion, Ben Trott's response, and 6A supporter and plug-in writer Timothy Appnel's comments.

I myself have said more than enough about MovableType and SixApart, and gained some unwanted notoriety through a poor choice of weblog post titles. I've also have had my criticisms misrepresented, and Anil Dash has fairly called upon me to examine my criticisms. As a result I reread Anil's post about criticism, and reread for about the 10th time Phil Ringnalda's classic post on the same subject, there is no they, and I've decided not to spend any more time offering what Anil called "unsolicited criticism." We all have more important things to do.

I will just note that I as I have said elsewhere thought MovableType was a was a brilliant product when I first encountered it. The documentation, user interface, features and support were superb. I enjoyed the time learning how to hack the templates and add plugins. I appreciated the ethos of the old MT license -- if you make money, we make money, which seemed appropriate for a product built on top of a huge stack of open source code. I am extremely grateful for being allowed to use the product, and in return I evangelized the product, recommended it to friends and businesses, sold my kids' school on buying it, even put a plug for it on my SARS Watch Org site that was running pMachine. I also liked Ben and Mena a lot when I met them at lunch at Supernova 2002, and Anil when I met him later (Etech?), and in the correspondence I have had with various members of the 6A team over the last couple of years. So how could I have criticised them, and why would I have wanted to do such a mean thing?

I don't think any of them are bad people, I just think that they have made, and are continuing to make, some bad mistakes. A lot of their problems were avoidable and self-inflicted. Because I cared about the product and the people, but I don't really know the people (I sat next to Ben for a group lunch once where neither of us said one word the whole lunch), I said so, not in private email, but publicly, using their tool. Perhaps that was my mistake, but it seemed appropriate at the time.

In any case, I am gratified that some of them are starting to do a better job of talking with some of their audiences, and hopefully listening to them as well. I apologize for any personal distress I caused any of them, and I wish them the best of luck in their personal and professional endeavours.