MovableType to charge

Sat, 15 May 2004 22:15:54 +0000

Well, just a short time after Blogger’s new look and new features, so Movable Type have announced their MT3 Developer Edition, and hints on the new licensing they’ll use. One of the founders explains parts of it, but as you can tell by the comments on the bottom, virtually no-one is in favour of them.

I haven’t fully digested the license, but there’s a good chance I would have to pay for MT3 on this site… or just stay on this version, which is no bad thing. So far MT2.x has been donation ware - if you use it, you can donate money for it if you like. I must say that I DO donate for software like this that I use, and I see no reason not to. Six Apart, the developers of MT, have simply gone Pro on this release and obviously need/want a bit more payback from it. This I can understand, but at the moment some of the fees people are calculating are a huge increase. Remember - a huge increase generally means they were running lots of blog with lots of authors on big machines - maybe even be companies themselves.

I’m sure in the business meeting, Six Apart hoped many people would flock to their TypePad service for smaller blogs, but with Google now pushing their Blogger much more heavily, MT could’ve chosen the wrong time to do it. Also, there are now several fully open source Weblog engines around such as WordPress.

It’s not all over yet. The Developer Edition is not the general release and there is time to Six Apart to amend it, but I don’t see it coming - I see a lot of people staying on 2.661, other more tech savvy people getting a different (free) system, and the rest using Blogger.

In some respects, maybe too many didn’t donate?

Maybe more on this later.

My on Nanikore

MovableType to charge