MovableType Shakeup

Bloggers are all bent out of shape with the new pricing and licensing structure of SixApart’s MovableType. The options for the tool have been reduced from unlimited weblogs to various amounts at different pricing points.
But the big stink is that they will be charging those that use the tool for strictly personal use – a departure from their previous license. At the same time, you can still get a slightly-crippled version of the product, MovableType Free, that includes a few limits to the product as well as no direct tech support from Six Apart.
My take? I think that moving a product from free to pay is always a losing proposition but it is part of Six Apart maturing into a real ‘tech solutions’ comany – as well as a maturation of blogging as a corporate practice. I think it’s a bad move in the short term because it’s burning a lot of good will and the reaction from the community has been resoundingly negative.
Sure there are other blog tools that do weblogs just fine – but for now MT has the greatest number of extensions and plug-ins that allow you to use it for whatever you want. Once WordPress moves to supporting multi-blogs, maybe I’ll change over. But for now I’m getting by just fine with MovableType 2.64.


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