License Changes with Movable Type 3
There are two types of bloggers. One is willing to pay for services and support, and another is willing to tweak and bend for something that is free. However, looking at the blogosphere, you can say that majority of bloggers belong to the second category. There are only few people I know who are willing to pay for a quality weblog service like TypePad. Majority of others are either putting up with banner ads attached free services (Blogger/Blog*Spot, Xanga or LiveJournal), or rolling their own (Movable Type, Blosxom or WordPress). For them, “paying for a weblog” might have never come across their mind.
Yesterday, Movable Type announced availability Movable Type 3.0 Developers Edition, so that plugin developers can have a head start to develop new tools or port 2.x plugins over. A $20,000 plugin contest has also been kicked off. At the same time, a new licensing model has been releaseed, with a few changes that put bloggers looking for freebies into disadvantage.
While there will still be a “free edition” of Movable Type 3, the usage will be limited to non-commercial use and no more than one author and three weblogs. One thing that really puts Movable Type above the rest is its multi-user and multi-site support. You only need to install one single copy of Movable Type, and you can easily create as many sites with as many authors that the system can handle. The new free license, however, forbids people who host multiple blogs for family and friends. You basically cannot use Movable Type 3 for free, if you want to have multiple authors.
Mena Trott reckoned that this model will suit 85% of case, but no, it does not suit me. Specifically, it does not suit FOCUSer.net, the blogging environment for members of my church, which currently has around 20 personal blogs. Here are some possible solutions:
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Paying for a license. However, the buying Movable Type page is not very clear on details of personal sites with 20+ authors. The license comes with support that I would never need anyway. Moreover, at USD$149.95 for 9 authors and 10 weblogs, it is really too deal for me. Actually, paying anything for a weblog software is too deal for me.
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Violating the license limitation. Mena Trott mentioned:
We’re big on honor at Six Apart. We haven’t built in any nagware for license violations or phone home mechanisms. We trust our users’ good judgment and intentions. We intend to use our good judgment in being flexible about enforcing these limits.
I wonder how many people would actually go violating the limitation, and host multiple authors/blogs on one single free installation. Well, some other people do have their sense of ethics and principles, and I don’t want my friends in FOCUS to feel that they are writing on an illegal operation.
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Stay in Movable Type 2.661. The new license only applies to the up-coming Movable Type 3, which means I can still host multiple non-commercial blogs on a single copy of Movable Type 2. It requires least effort, and I am pretty sure that no one on FOCUSer.net would want the latest features. I think I’ll probably go through this route.
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Use another blogging tool. WordPress is something I am particularly interested in. The new 1.2 release looks very sleek, and has hierarchical categories that I would like to have. However, it would require a lot of work converting all our blogsites to another tool. With my current commitments, I don’t see it is possible.
Looking at the trackback section of Mena’s announcement on license changes, recent upgrade to Blogger, and WordPress and TextPattern gaining popularity – a blog tool war is starting to heat up. Maybe this announcement has already signalled the end of Movable Type’s reign as the king of self hosting based blog tools.
To be continued.
Comments
In the end, excellent apps like MT will only improve if it’s economically feasible to do so. pMachine seemed to be the first weblog tool to go commercial with Expression Engine.
I guess the big problem is large-scale non-commercial use (rather than the personal blog). Certainly for our Church site, we would be willing to pay for the right software, but the $$$ would have to be reasonable for a non-commercial organisation.
Yes. With Expression Engine, you pay something like USD$44 to have unlimited authors and unlimited blogs. Various reviews also have demonstrated its superiority in comparison with MT. Now with 6A charging USD$70 for personal license supporting only 3 authors and 5 blogs, EE now looks much much better.
What I did not spell out in my article is one problem I found with 6A and MT. At the end, MT is not an open source software. If it is, it would have no issue finding support and improvements. Look at Cafelog, b2 and WordPress – they have grown a lot over the past year. MT is where it is today because of its low entry price (back then), which then creates a good community with lots of people writing free plugins for it. Now we are at version 3, and 6A suddenly want to charge non-commercial deployments with large number of authors or blogs, which was free previously. It is definitely going to hit the community that has made MT as what it is today. People will either stay where they are at 2.661, or go with a open source alternative, so that they will not be bitten again.
Oops. I think I was wrong. Expression Engine costs $149 for non-commercial use, and $199 for commercial license.
https://secure.pmachine.com/index.php?ACT=EE
But compare to the new license of MT3. Hmm…
Confession: I’m the TYPE TWO BLOGGER.
I have a blog but I don’t know much about blogs… are there actually blog-softwares that you just need to install it and then…start blogging (sorry, I’m an computer & internet idiot)?! Honestly I don’t mind paying, but I have to graduate first :P
Miss Type Two,
I have no idea on how to reply your comment. It is Movable Type “version 3″! LOL. 有點特意來搞笑的傾向喔…
Anyway. Let us continue the discussion on the license changes to MT3.
:P OOOOOH!! Movable Type “version 3″!?!? I knew that :P
Alright alright, I’ll beeee quiet and read! :P
Hi, just stumbled upon your blog… ^_^
Have you heard of Plog(http://www.plogworld.org/)?
PHP based and supports multi-user
Might be an interesting one to look at
Yup. Just checked the plog website and it seems to be an interesting implementation. I might give it test drive. One thing I worried is the user base, as it might lack the user communities of MT or WP. But being PHP it is definitely more hackable (by me) than Perl based MT.
Btw, are you Anderson who visited MBF on Sunday? Sorry that I did not have a chance to talk to you. Wish you and Jenny well in your “church shopping”, but we will always be delighted to see you come back :)
Yup, it’t me. Thank you.
pLog seems to support user communities, there are currently 11 users using in our website. However, pLog still needs a lot of tweak, but it looks promising.
As of user community, I was actually talking about the user base – where you can get supports, plugins, extra hacks, etc. I think having a good community, especially in the OSS scene, is a *good thing*, as there will always be active development. There are many blogging tools these days, many OSS, some gives you free beer, and some costs you. I do prefer something that will be developed actively.
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Playground is the personal weblog of Scott Yang, a Chinese-Australian Christian who works as a software developer in Sydney Australia.
i think 2.661 is working fine; no need to go premium with 3 if it costs money.