Modern Geekery

To call that "tore" would be pretty thin skinned.

I'm well versed in Mark's writings about Atom and RSS. Donating over $500 dollars to WordPress (something he never did for the years of use he got out of MT) to spite people he knows and claimed to like was ruder and more inconsiderate then anything he's ever written on the syndication formats. In fact its just plain malicious. I'm fine with the donation and commend anyone that gives that much to am open source project, but I'm galled by the intention behind it.

Ben and Mena have a long track record of putting out a quality product and trying to do the right thing by the community by almost giving away their work for over 2 years. They (Six Apart) are not perfect. They made mistakes. They could have handled this better. Are you perfect? Have you ever screwed something up big time?

I'm growing quite tired of all of this over-the-top bittneress. If you have a difference of opinion, then just go and at least have the courtesy to thank then for all they've done.

[1] http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/33072#671164

Tim,

I wouldn't call donating that money to the WP folks rude in any way. I'd call it necessary. I'm sure you know as well as I do that had Mark -not- made a point of donating the equivalent amount of money, he would have been roasted for being "cheap" or for wanting "something for nothing."

I've seen that argument used too many times over the weekend to marginalize good and valid points about 6A's problematic approach to MT3 licensing. I don't think it is fair to assume that Mark was doing so to poke the Trotts in the eye. I think he was simply trying to make his point that his problems were not about the money. (Although at $600 for a personal weblog, my problems most certainly would have been about the money! That's an order of magnitude too high.)

And if you saw any bitterness here towards the Trotts in my posts, you're reading too much into them. As I pointed out in my previous post on the subject, I really hope they get this straightened out to everyone's satisfaction. They're good people, doing good things, with good software. The curious, disappointing thing is, as I mentioned earlier, that they seem to have no earthly idea how their software is being used. That's inexcusable.

Yes, they have a good track record. Yes, they're good people. But it's not like this is just one fsck up that we're talking about here. They've ignored concerns and requests for clarifications from the time that the community asked "Why are you working on TypePad instead of improving MT?" They ignored the valid criticisms of TypeKey. And now this.

I would be willing to bet substantially that had they been engaging in a meaningful dialog with their customers from the get go, this would not have blown up in their faces even if they'd made the exact same mistakes with respect to their licensing.