Six Apart has just announced their new licensing and pricing of Movable Type 3. In short, if you want more than one author or more than three blogs, you’ll have to pay at least $69.95 (that’s a limited offer sale, normal price is $99.99). The cost goes up to $699.95 for the commercial edition with 20 authors. You can see by the trackbacks on that post that the MT user community is not happy with this change.
I’m not sure if I’ll stay or go, but I’m definitely gonna check out my options. Time to take a serious look at WordPress.
I look at MT sorta like I look at my computer. MT 2.6 will work just fine for me, thank you… just as my AMD XP2500+ with 512MB of RAM will be sufficient for quite some time. Ya know, if it ain’t broke…
Thanks for posting about this. I read it here first.
Blunted,
You make an excellent point. But the one thing I was looking forward to was a better way to manage comment spam. And since I’m not really thrilled with TypeKey, this just may be reason enough to switch to some other platform.
Typekey sucks. I hate to say it like that, but it’s true. I may just jump to WordPress.
Six Apart’s approach to MT with their licensing and costs are what initially turned me off, along with the fact that it’s not PHP, but PERL (is still is, right?). I have used WordPress from the beginning. I love it. It’s open source and it’s free. It’s building a solid base of users and it has a dedicated group of programmers, coders, hackers/plug-in creators. It is the “no limits” blog software I considered to be the best among the many I reviewed before making my choice.
Another reason, too, is that I always route for the underdog. MT seemed overrated and overused by so many, while WordPress wasn’t getting the user base it deserves for an excellent option. The comments I’ve seen about MT 3.0 and Six Apart’s new licensing/pricing structure have reaffirmed my decision.
Good luck if you decide to transition. There are some new changes coming to WordPress that I think you would like…
Clarification: WordPress is licensed under GPL.
ej,
You should check out MT-Blacklist, a pretty nifty add-on that helps you manage comment spam and block out new IPs and specific URLs. I installed it when I was getting an average of 10-15 blog spams a day, now I get about 3 a week.