Movable Type 3.0 Licensing Update

Six Apart has announced new pricing & licensing for MT 3.0. The free license remains the same: one author and 3 weblogs (a weblog consisting of however many MT blogs it takes to run one site). All paid licenses allow unlimited weblogs, and are priced based on how many active authors you have. They also introduced educational and not-for-profit pricing.

I’m happy with the new pricing and licenses. It’s clear they’ve been listening to their users, and I think they found a good compromise. You don’t see many companies willing to pay attention to their customers like this. Try e-mailing Microsoft and telling them what you think of their pricing. Unless you’re on the Fortune 500, you shouldn’t spend much time waiting for a reply.

What does this mean for me? Well, Central Oklahoma Mensa is a not-for-profit with no paid employees, so I can make unlimited use of MT 3.0 for free on that site. I’ll probably upgrade it as soon as I can so we can use some of the comment management features.

I’m working on a redesign of Smart Goat, and I would like to have some kind of CMS to control it, but a $199 commercial license isn’t really in our budget this year. I might use MT 3.0 if I qualify for a free commercial license, otherwise I’ll look elsewhere.

I also haven’t decided what to do with News Goat. I’m a man who enjoys a good bandwagon, so I’ve been thinking about trying WordPress. It looks like I may have some time soon to work on this, so I’ll be deciding something pretty soon.