pavlov.net

As most people probably know, along with the release of Movable Type 3.0 came a new set of pricing and licensing. A lot of people are up at arms over this for a huge variety of reasons. Having already donated, upgrading to the personal edition didn’t cost me much. Mena then posted a follow up explaining some changes they are making.

Even with the latest changes, I still don’t really like the cost for sites with lots of blogs/authors. Take MozillaZine for example. They provide free blogs for a lot of Mozilla community members. They have something like 30 blogs and 30 authors. MozillaZine would have to pay $69.99 for a personal license giving them 5 blogs and 5 authors and then spend another $10 per blog/author they needed. Thats $319.99 if they want to upgrade to Movable Type 3.0 plus $10 per additional blog. Since the service they provide is free, it doesn’t really make sense to me for them to continue to use Movable Type.

I would love to see a single personal license that covers unlimited blogs and authors. I suspect sites like MozillaZine would buy that. I think the commercial license is probably fine and I would leave it alone. I know that SixApart needs to make some money, especially since they are hiring more developers. I would expect that hiring more developers will help with adding the new features to Movable Type that everyone wants. I guess all I’m really trying to say is that the pricing works for me, but I don’t think it works for everyone. I hope that SixApart can figure something out so that a people won’t move away from their great software.