Six Apart announces new licensing for MovableType 3.0.
I, for one, will stick with MovableType. The other platforms don’t even come close.
UPDATE: Cruftbox says what I wanted to say. Pay for the things in life that are worth it.
Cruft: Whiny bloggers flip out
Mena’s Corner: It’s About Time
Movable Type RIP | Metafilter
Movable Type 3
Movable Type’s new pricing scheme
Movable Type 3
Movable Type’s new pricing scheme
WordPress was best for me, and I switched about 6 months ago.
My how-to with some help, too might help you move, if you decide to.
WordPress is just so much more flexible, easy to hack, and use that MT, that I was honestly surprised for my first few weeks. The dev community is open, so your work gets used, too.
I don’t see a reason to upgrade as of yet.
Dave
I did a migration some time ago (from Radio to my home-grown software). It’s a significant amount of work when you are migrating from a proprietary database like Radio’s, fortunately MT used MySQL, it should be much easier to move (keeping permalinks working is probably the hardest part).
I wanted blogging software in Python, so MT didn’t make the cut (I switched from Perl to Python in 1994, and I am never going back…), but in any case the semi-open licensing always looked fishy to me.
I can’t say that I disagree with them trying to get money for it. I really like MT and everything that can be done with it. I’m totally satisfied. And in any case, this wont even effect me as I don’t even need all the functionality on 2.66, let alone anything that may be in 3. I wanted to download the developer addition to look at it, but it requires a TypeKey ID, something I don’t have and don’t need, therefore don’t intend to register for.
It does make me consider moving to something else though. I currently have three “live” blogs of my own, one blog I use to test things out, and one that is set up for my sister. I am fine with 2.6, but someday I will get the itch to make some kind of change. I can’t afford to upgrade, although I wouldn’t be worried about being caught running more blogs that than I am allowed to. But really, I think I should start being less dependent on something I don’t have free control over. I never know what will happen in the future, what if I need to upgrade after I have invested another years worth of work into this… it will just be that much more of a pain in the ass to migrate.
On the other hand, I foresee all the migration headaches clearing up over night. The people that seem most likely to leave now are the developer-minded users, and when they leave they will have to migrate, and when they have to migrate they will make tools making it a snap to migrate to any other OS blog. What about an open source blog converter, some application that knows how to handle conversions from all the major blogs? (now I’m out of comment/rant mode, and blabbing about a idea-I-just-had mode.) If such a tool got enough users, it could actually create a better standard interface for importing from other blogs. It would be in the best interest of all the upstart developers to make their new software compatible, making it easy for people to switch.
For the time being, since migrating might be impossible to non-techies, but only a pain in the butt to geeks, I’m sure there are a lot of geeks (like me) who would offer “migration services” to another software for cheaper than the new license fee.
Anyway, to sum up.
1) I agree that MT is not wrong to charge. They have to make money, and developing and support takes a lot of time.
2) Even though I agree, if I ever choose to upgrade, it costs more than it is worth to me to stick with MT, so I will leave.
3) I think that alienating the developer crowd will cause them to use their skills for things that hurt MT rather than help it, as in the past.
Given their new announcement, I see that I can now afford to use the lowest priced liscence for my needs _if_ I ever decide to upgrade. Not that I have anything against the MT people, but the damage may already be done in my case. I don’t feel like I have to move, but just this little PR snafu got me looking at other CMS solutions, and I must say I am intruiged. There is a good chance I will switch anyway, not because I am dissatissfied or because they are not open source or anything like that, but it made me look around, and opened my mind to other options.
I started with my own home gorwn software, found MT and that it did everything on my to-do list and more, so switched. For the past two years, I have done little research into other blog software. But this one little PR slip made me look… The Blosxm solution really has the geek in me curious… I may just switch yet…