More Thoughts on MT 3.0

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Much has been written about MT 3.0 in the last few days:

Since I first wrote about this, Six Apart has made some changes to their licensing. They have clarified that a “weblog” refers to a single site, regardless of how many MT weblogs you use to generate that site. Also, authors that are inactive for 90 days do not count toward licensing.

I hope that it’s clear that I’m pretty agnostic about the whole thing. Movable Type is great software — if they want to charge for it, they should. It’s worth it: MT is one of the best content management systems I’ve ever seen. The pricing is not unreasonable. I do think, though, that they made two mistakes: Trying to apply a rigid licensing system to a flexible software system and not getting more input from users before rolling out this plan.

I’m still not entirely sure what I’ll do if I can’t use the free version of MT 3.0. For me, it’s not a matter of principal, it’s economics. OKMensa is non-profit. The group can not afford this software, whatever it costs, and I’m not willing to pay for them to have a license out of my own pocket. And, it’s just not worth it for News Goat, either. I do this because I enjoy it, and it’s a pretty cheap hobby. It’s just not something I see any reason to invest money in. I guess that’s what it comes down to: Movable Type 3.0 is worth the money, but the things I would use it for are not.

There’s no need to decide right away — Six Apart is still making changes to their licensing. For the short term, I’ll stick with MT 2.6x for all my MT sites. I’m still considering ads for News Goat. It’s something I’ve thought about doing before, and now there’s something specific I could be raising the money for. Or, if the time comes when MT 2.6x no longer fills my needs, I might try TextPattern or WordPress.

For OKMensa, moving to a different CMS is simply not an option, at least not for a couple of years. I just got everything the way I like it a couple of months ago, and the amount of custom code in that thing would make migration painful. Really painful. A hot poker stabbed in the ear kind of painful. No, we won’t be doing that. ~~If I buy a personal license, OKMensa can be one of my blogs.~~ Update: Scratch that, I just reread the personal license. Non-profits do not qualify for a personal license. Whatever the future is for OKMensa, it doesn’t include any future versions of MT.