What's in the Water Over at Six Apart? »
Intrepid readers of RSS feeds may have noticed an odd happening in the Movable Type Community Blog the other day - unfortunately you can't actually read it if you check the site now, you would have had to catch it in your feed-reader (or your feed-reader would have had to catch it for you, or you'll have to catch it later on in this entry). Product Manager Byrne Reese remarked Since the day we released Movable Type Open Source more than a year ago.
Everyone catch that? Apparently according to Byrne, MTOS came out sometime before June 3rd, 2007. Yet, the official announcement of a stable release was on January 28, 2008, and Anil Dash made the GPL licensing announcement on December 12, 2007 (my birthday, but that doesn't matter). How the heck did Byrne lose more than six months? I'm all for being on "Internet Time", but this is a little bit much, isn't it?
If you read the entry now, you'll see that the text has been changed - so obviously someone figured out the problem and fixed it post-haste, but not before Google Reader, at least, picked it up. As of now, you can see that the text has been altered to say Since the day we released Movable Type Open Source. Definitely more accurate, but not nearly as entertaining. I have a screenshot of the faux pas, which you can see below. But I still would like to know how the dates are so far off. I mean a couple of days, sure, but six months?
I'm also curious about the fact that Byrne mentions multiple databases in the configuration. MTOS, the obvious lead-in to the article, comes with support for only Postgres, MySQL and SQLite - in order to run on Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, you need to purchase a much pricier solution.
It isn't that I mind Six Apart collecting the information - it just makes it seem that MTOS will run on all those database out-of-the-box. And maybe MTOS 4.2, due out "soonish" (which may or may not happen, as it's been coming for a while now), will support more databases. But at the moment, you can't take MTOS and run it on Oracle. I can't imagine too many will want to - but you just can't do it, and I so hate misdirection.
To make matters even stranger, there is then a question in the survey that asks What type of shared hosting do you use? One of the options is "dedicated". Another is "shared". Hrm. Have to look into one of those dedicated shared hosts, or maybe just stick with my shared shared host. Then the "anonymous" survey requires you to enter the URL to your blog. That's right, a question with a required answer that will tell Six Apart exactly who you are. So much for anonymity. Luckily, it doesn't have to be your URL, and it doesn't even have to be formatted as a URL.
Thanks for the laughs, Byrne!
Almost forgot - here's the image that shows you the original form of the entry, in case you think I'm making it all up.
Comments (2)
I'm pretty sure Byrne just mixed up the date we announced MTOS and the date we shipped it, which doesn't seem like that big a deal to me. It seems especially unkind to point out a simple typo that was quickly fixed when it's not like anybody was trying to be deceptive, just making a harmless error.
To your other points, Byrne mentions multiple databases, and MTOS supports mutliple databases. So I don't understand the objection there -- there's no misdirection, and as far as I know, I haven't heard from anybody who wants to use Oracle but only wants to use open source software, since those are kind of mutually exclusive in most cases.
Your point is well taken on the wording with "shared" being in hosting and the requirement of the URL, I'll see if I can get those fixed. In the meantime, I hope you'll try to keep in mind that there's real people over here at Six Apart, and my friends who I work with probably don't like being laughed at (publicly!) for simple mistakes any more than you would. If you've got more feedback, though, as always I'm happy to hear from you. :)
Posted by Anil on June 5, 2008 12:23 PM
Wow, Anil, two comments in two days? I'm honored. :)
But come on - you of all people ought to understand taking things with a grain of salt! I have no doubt that Byrne has the release dates tatooed somewhere on his body, but as the product manager of Movable Type, I found it amusing that he couldn't tell the difference between six months and a year. I think others will as well.
As to the databases, the article starts off with MTOS, and you know as well as I do that MTOS doesn't support two of the five mentioned. That's 40% of the databases listed, and if you go to the requirements page, you don't even see those other two mentioned as an option for any version of MT. That's confusing at best.
While MT Enterprise (or whatever it's called these days) does support the other databases, there's no mention of it anywhere - not on the blog post, not on the system requirements, nowhere. That may not be intentionally misleading, but it's not exactly up-front, either.
And since posting comments to the mt.org pages often never get published (I posted one about a week ago that still hasn't seen the light of day), I put it here. The same is true for comments on Byrne's blog - I added one there weeks ago that still hasn't been published. Publish comments on the page where it's written, and I'll do so there. I have nothing to hide.
For the survey, well, that was obviously put together hastily. Probably won't be too many people that notice that shared hosting question, I'm just anal about that sort of thing. The one that asks for your public URL is just telling people it's anonymous and then doing a complete 180, especially if no one pays attention and that's just wrong.
But hey, it's your survey. Do what you like. :)
Posted by Chad Everett on June 5, 2008 1:25 PM