I go away for two weeks and apparently all hell breaks loose in the blogging world: Movable Type announced a newer, restrictive and much more expensive licensing scheme with their 3.0 Developer release and no one seems happy about it. To be honest, I’m not sure what this means for people like me since I still use 2.6x and had no immediate plans to upgrade to 3.0. I had been checking into TextPattern for my other domain right before I left for Chicago because I wanted to try something different for that site since it’s more of a photoblog. Now it appears that I can either switch to TextPattern for this site as well, pony up the dosh for 3.0 or remain permanently esconced in 2.6x. Time will tell.
Update: I’ve been thoroughly entertained reading through the responses in the major blog venues about 6Aparts’ latest release. Hyperbole, overreaction, indignation or agreement seem to be the most common themes in the comments concerning this new release and licensing scheme. Some people are definitely pissed off while others seem to ponder, shrug and move on. I tend to side with the latter, but I can see where the negativity is coming from with the former. As for my situation, It looks as though I can upgrade freely to 3.0 because I am within the one author three blog limit.
My personal opinion is that 6Apart (at this point you can’t really refer to them as Ben and Mena anymore) can charge whatever they damn well please. Movable Type is not OSS, which can be a problem for some people. Their software has matured and is feature-rich. They need to think and act as the business principals of a small software company, so they are pricing the CMS accordingly. That being said, I think they screwed the pooch on executing the announcement of the change in their licensing.
Community trumps features. That is the adage for most programming languages (perl vs. python, CPAN vs. ?) and that was the reason Movable Type had such a loyal following: a community of users who added value by supporting each other through peer support and by creating incredibly useful plugins. I think a lot of that community goodwill, or at least the illusion of community, was taken away with their sudden announcement and pricing structure.
They are free to price their product at whatever level the market will bear. Personally, I think they should have kept 3.0 free for individual or non-commercial use, while being more stringent with the definition of commercial use (using adwords on a personal blog would make it commercial). This would still leave them street credibility in my eyes while not alienating their core user base. They would then be free to maximize their focus on real sources of revenue: businesses and corporations that use MT internally.
Sure, most of the current MT users are individual, non-commercial and non-paying, and 6A technically owes them nothing since they use their software for free. But remember it was those same lusers that gave them blog mindshare, and a sense of software community for years. Do you think they would be where they are now without them? Doubtful. If this community evaporates because of their current moves, do you think this release will be as resoundingly successful as their previous releases? Maybe not.
As for me, I’ll probably play with TextPattern or Wordpress some more on the weekends and decide whether or not to migrate to them in the near future. If I do change platforms, I know it will be a major pain in the ass either way. In that sense, 6A has the advantage because like most incumbents, they have attrition on their side.
