With the release of Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition, Six Apart has unveiled a paid licensing structure for installations that involve more than one user or more than three weblogs.
The Movable Type installation at Struat.com supports two users with five active weblogs. If I were to upgrade to Movable Type 3.0, the license would cost me $69.95 ($99.95 after the introductory period).
I’ll be launching another project soon that will be comprised of two Movable Type blogs. This would raise the licensing price for a Movable Type 3.0 installation to $119.95 ($149.95 after the introductory period).
My commercial used book site will include some weblog elements. If I used Movable Type on that site, as I’ve been planning to, the most restrictive commercial license would cost me another $199.95. It seems conceivable that I might use more than five blogs there — licensing for that setup would cost $599.99.
I’ve gotten a lot of value out of Movable Type — probably $120 worth. If I were to upgrade to the new version, it’s possible that it might be worth the licensing fee. But the new restrictions make a paid copy of Movable Type version 3.0 less flexible — less valuable — than my current installation (under its “legacy” license). The new weblog and user limits feel arbitrary to me (“feel arbitrary,” though I’m sure that a lot of thought went into them). I won’t be upgrading my software under these restrictions, and I won’t be able to use Movable Type on my books site. I’m really disappointed. Movable Type is a great piece of software.
I think you should write to them what you wrote here in your entry. Perhaps ask for an explanation, or better yet, request that Movable Type consider a sliding scale for small businesses.
Jeff-
Wow, you’re the second person I know whom I’ve found via Trackbacks from Mena’s post. I agree – this is enough to make one jump ship. What’s really weird is that there’s no license equivalent to what you can get free with 2.661 – unlimited blogs and unlimited authors. It’s simply not available. Weird.
Do you know of any other good blogging tools that have comparable features and static (e.g. non-PHP) output? I don’t want my pages hidden inside a database where Google can’t find them.
I’m going to get an email out to them shortly.
I’m considering Textpattern or the next version of WordPress for my new sites. They’re both in PHP and serve dynamic pages, but they use Apache’s mod_rewrite to avoid using query strings in the URLs. To a search engine spider, it would look the same as a static page.
WordPress is open source/GPL, which is a big plus.
sam: My home-brewed weblog software (php/mysql based) is dynamically generated and highly google friendly. All entries can be accessed in the form of /yyyy/mm/dd or /entryID.
There’s a number of tricks, either with apache or with URL parsing that can be used to make friendly urls.
Here‘s the text of an email that I sent to Six Apart CEO Mena Trott, and Anil Dash, Vice President of Business Development.