MovableType 3 update

I sat down and looked at the new MT license, and the costings, and I think I fall under the ‘Movable Type Free’ system, as I’m one person with one blog. Yes, despite the furor, there *is* still a free version.

What’s the next step up? A USD70 license, which will go up to USD100 at some point. That’s a big price leap, Six Apart! My issue here would’ve been graduation, though they have introduced ‘bolt on’ licenses for extra blog and authors at USD10 a go, which is a fair offer.

Since I wrote my last post, I did find some other revisions circulating, such as there being one license per CPU, which has now gone – I think this was a crucial change for many users, whether they knew it or not. Good move there SixApart.

Let’s say something here though, that to be honest has been said best on Daring Fireball – MT is still a great piece of software.

However, for those who freaked out at the first sight of the words ‘commercial license’ and a dollar sign, the damage to SixApart may have already been done. They’ve already gone looking for alternatives, when they didn’t before. This isn’t a lapse of MT3, this is a lapse of SixApart’s announcement style, and a certain type of user. In many ways they’re victims of the community they sought to build.

I’m a small player in all of this – I post bits a couple of times a week, that’s all, so I was looking for more informed opinion, and despite the following two links’ authors being plug-in developers for MT, I think they make valid points:

First Brad Choate, uber MT God, and then MT-Blacklist author Jay Allen.

Upon reflection, I support Six Apart as a young company. They aren’t open source, it’s not a GPL piece of software and never has been. It’s a few people trying to kick off a business. Some of these people complaining run many blogs on the MT platform AND they probably have day jobs too to pay the rent. The bottom line is: How much is MT worth to you? And, how many donated under the previous honour system?

Maybe we’ve come to think that everything should be free on the net. The fact is, for a lot of people the MT platform makes their life a lot easier, a lot of companies use it; a lot of commercial websites use it (and yes, I include bloggers who run adverts on their pages in there). How many paid? Some people make money from ads on pages which run MT and see no reason to divert some of that cash to SixApart?

Will I stay with MT? Well, MT2.661 is serving me fine. Will I go to 3? Maybe, and even though I qualify for the Free version, I may donate anyway – I get value from it. However, when I look at the feature list, as a small time end-user, it doesn’t leave me drooling.

Maybe I’ll go to WordPress and follow my GPL obsession. Whichever way it goes, in the cold light of day I think it’s made a lot of people think about their blog, and their software. I hope a lot of people are honest with themselves and pay if they conclude that it’s money for something you use every day, doing something you care about – past, present and in the future.