8 Ways to Sunday

I’m noticing in my referrer logs that many people are still visiting an old post on my beta-test blog by following the trackback I left on Mena’s Corner. The post in question deals with my decision to move to WordPress after the choices Six Apart had made regarding the licensing of Movable Type 3.0. In the interest of fairness, I want to give those people an update on both the status of Movable Type’s licensing and on my own use of the product.

To their tremendous credit, Six Apart (the company behind MT) has listened to community feedback and dramatically revised their licensing scheme to reflect the needs and financial capability of their various customers. The new licensing system is a common sense, easily understood approach that breaks things down into four categories of users: personal, commercial, educational, and not-for-profit.

The personal license category — probably accounting for the majority of MT’s users — now offers an unlimited-use version for only $99.95. This is a vast improvement over the hundreds of dollars that MT power-users like Mark Pilgrim would’ve had to spend to upgrade to MT 3.x under the old license terms. A free personal license for one author with up to three weblogs is also available. The tiered license programs for companies, schools, and non-profits are similarly reasonable, especially when you take into account the vast feature improvements made in version 3.1: subcategories, dynamic pages, and more.

With this new licensing structure and 3.1’s improved feature set, Six Apart’s Movable Type can now compete on more even ground with P Machine’s Expression Engine for users of all types. Expression Engine still has a maximum price of $199 for commercial use — far less than MT’s $1,299.95 top-end commercial license — but MT still qualifies as a bargain in the rarified world of enterprise software and packs the maturity and flexibility to back up the high price. EE, by comparison, is an outstanding product that still has some growing to do before it can fulfill its substantial potential.

I hope this provides a new, more current perspective on the old MT licensing brouhaha. Though I moved to WordPress for my weblog and have been very happy with its speed and flexibility, I’ve stayed with MT for my photoblog because of search features that I planned to implement there which other blog tools couldn’t match. I’m now using version 3.11, and eager to take advantage of the added capabilities as time permits.

If you have thoughts on the progress Movable Type has made since version 3 was released and the blogosphere was in an uproar over the licensing terms, feel free to post them below.