MT3.0

Well, everyone's heard the news - there will be a cost associated with certain versions of Moveable Type 3.0.

There's been a lot of uproar over this, and tubedogg at Gamewhore has some good thoughts (and some good links to other people's good thoughts) about the problems with the new licensing scheme for Moveable Type.

There's been a lot of debate about this, but my feelings can be summed up prettty succinctly:

• Six Apart have every right to charge for new versions of their software, for premium features, and for support.
  
• I would have been happy to pay a reasonable (i.e. less than US$50) price for v3.0 of Moveable Type provided that I could use it in exactly the same way I'm using v2.6x. Specifically: no commercial use, no premium features, no support from Six Apart, unlimited authors, unlimited blogs.
  
• The US$100 cost to upgrade to v3.0 just so my wife and I can continue to be separate authors on our weblog is prohibitive, and I won't be paying it. I'll stay on MT v2.6x until I can find a suitable replacement.
  
• To encourage users to take advantage of features in your free software, only to use the degree to which users have exploited those same features as the basis for your new pricing scheme is shady at best. That strategy gives me the whole "the first one's free" crack-dealer vibe and makes me disinclined to want to do business with people who pursue it.

Anyhow, those are my $0.02.

Posted by Dan on May 14, 2004 at 12:27 PM | TrackBack