Gavin, 16 May 04
Six Apart have announced a new pricing strategy to go along with the release of MovableType 3.0 – it seems to have gone down as well as a turd in a swimming pool.
Mark Pilgrim has joined the exodus favouring the open source WordPress. Meanwhile, Burningbird , already a WordPress user provides concise updates on this episode including how a ‘mistake’ in the terms which seemed to restrict usage to a single CPU and the effect of this with Hosting Matters considering removing MT.
Myself, with this modest single user blog, I have at least four options:
I think the arguments that Mark Pilgrim made about ‘open-enough’ software are true. And although these recent changes do not impact directly on me in the short term, it does highlight the problem in relying upon software that is, at the end of the day, closed. There’s nothing to say that MT3.1 or later will be free or even available for personal use at all.
It means I’m not as likely to donate or recommend MT for others either to use as a personal tool or commercially.
The crux of the problem being that a number of MT users are using the software for a number of blogs amongst friends. This is done in a non-commercial way, developing web-based communities. Such efforts in creating online discourse and grass-roots content is what blogs are all about, and as far as I’m concerned – it should be what the web is all about. Asking these folks upwards of $100 a pop for the software was always going to stir things up.
That said the situation has been changing in a relatively short space of time, with the CPU limit removed and clarification of what Six Apart mean when they talk of the number of permitted weblogs (it’s not the same as the number of weblogs as defined by the MT software). So maybe if Six Apart are showing that they are willing to be user-focused and admit when they can do things better by listening to their users, I will keep with MT and see how things develop.
