Why, MT, WHY?

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So, Movable Type 3.0 was released yesterday. I of course found this out by them sending out an email saying “Yeah, we kind of dropped a bomb with this one…” to which I promptly said “HUH?!?” and dashed off to read about what is going on.

MT 3 is out, and has all the features they’ve been talking about having. That’s good. The bad? A SIX HUNDRED DOLLAR PRICE TAG. In the time between 2.6 and 3.0, they decided to “improve” their licensing structure by taking a page from UserLand and dropping a unmerited price tag onto software that is competing (and it’s honest to god competition) with FREE SOFTWARE.

They do offer a crippled free version, with the caveats that it can only have ONE weblog in the installation, and only ONE author. Further, there is a CPU restriction on that installation, so you can’t even install the free version on a dual processor for testing purposes (and you’re SOL if the server you’re hosted on happens to be multi-processor).

Suffice it to say, my “upgrade” will be taking a while longer. Like, however long it takes for me to go learn Flash and MySQL, which I’ll use to homebrew my own setup. I am VERY disappointed with their decision and apparent complete lack of market research in developing an effective pricing model.

6 thoughts on “Why, MT, WHY?”

  1. Well, that about does it for my use of MT. Guess I’ll just have to find other alternatives now.

    Or tag along on whatever you develope.

    Pop

  2. Hm. A quick glance at the site seems to indicate that the main new feature is comment registration. Is that pretty much it? If so, it’s one expensive feature….

    I heard they were going to charge earlier. I figured it was like $30, which seemed a little disappointing, but mostly for the pricinciple of the thing. Then I thought: that’s a stupid principle, they should be able to make some money on all their work. But $600?! I can’t believe they jumped right up to $600. That’s insane!

    I’m not sure what other blog products really compete with MT…I never really bothered to research it because MT worked well enough for my purposes. Never really contemplated a Flash blog either, although it could be pretty slick. I’ve only just started playing with Flash, and that’s more because it came with Studio MX than because I actually had a project to use it on…but if you’re looking for some simultaneous learning, hit me with some e-mail!

  3. I went and looked at the price list. The top price on the commercial cversion is $600. There are other versions, and in the personal category, that are much less.

    Still, it is a bit of sticker shock. And I don’t really need anything that elaborate right now anyway. And when I do, I will have a client on hand to bill it to.

    Pop

  4. Gumble, stupid Six Apart. Any word on if they’ll change the licensing? Or is it really so screwed that there is no point trying to use the new version?

    Either way the flash thing will be cool. Be fun to watch what people do with it, though I suspect I will not go to it for my main site.

  5. To quote dave. “Why buy superduperspecialsoft version 2.54365 when version 2.54364 works just fine?” Personally i’m just going to stick with the old version as, new features at this point don’t interest me all that much.

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