A few days ago Six Apart announced the licensing plan for the new Movable Type 3.0. I first read about it at burning bird where Shelley wrote a series of articles about her move away from movable type. Today I read that Mark Pilgrim also moved to a new blogging software namely wordpress the one I have been laughing about so hard when Alex first installed it and had a bit of trouble getting it to run. Guess what: now it is his turn to laugh because his argument that he didn’t want to use MT because it wasn’t “free” and open source turns out to be a very important one. As Mark writes mt seemed “free enough” to me.
Well it is definitely free no more. Of course I could continue running 2.661 as I am now, but development will stop on this version. I know myself, I’ll be reading or seeing neat features/plugins and then I will see the “mt 3.0 required” and that will suck.
So I might really try to move to wordpress as well. Oh yeah and did I mention that I really cannot afford to pay for a mt license to host my 5 blogs and 10 authors?
*Fun fact* I was looking through the licensing page again to find out what I would have to pay for my mt installation and guess what: they have already changed the licensing cost … so right now I would be at 100,- (considering the early move offer and my $20 donation). So it seems Six Apart is thinking about their “smart move” ….
See you later.
Thanks for bringing this up on my radar. Not that it’s surprising for a commercial company to charge money for their producs – those guys have to live off something, after all. If the MT strategy actually helps their survival on the market remains to be seen. It doesn’t look cempetetive to me.
Don’t forget to check Joel on pricing (http://discuss.fogcreek.com/newyork/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=1389&ixReplies=7)