I have been a big Movabletype fan and use it on my blog. Thankfully I have never contributed code to the community. They released version 3 today in the form of a Developers Edition and introduced new pricing schemes.
Previously MT was free for non commercial sites. I could host blogs for friends without charging them and without paying for MT, multiple authors multiple blogs, fantastic. As long as you advertise them with little ‘powered by’ logos it was all good.
The new pricing structure shows how committed to a free version they are by removing all the mutli user support from the free versions. And even then with just one author you are only allowed 3 blogs.
For me to support just the few blogs I host I would need to fork out $70 to $120 at their 33% discounted introductory price. This is a huge step away from their previous licencing structure and one that is driving the community raging mad since a lot of people have provided free plugins, free development work, free beta testing and sent sixapart huge amounts of great ideas and so forth, only to be shafted by them. You only have to do a feedster search on the subject to see the outcry, you can also see the trackback on their posting that I linked above for a snip of it.
My only option to ever move away from MT 2.x is to install multiple versions of the free MT 3 on my machine, one per author and restrict them to 3 blogs. Creating a administrative nightmare for upgrades and so forth.
I suppose it is time one of these volunteers put their effort where it will be appreciate most at this point – write a migration tool away from MT 2.x to something else like Drupal, Typo3 or something Zope based ๐
NOTE: This is a static archive of an old blog, no interactions like search or categories are current.
