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May 13, 2004
Movable Bandwagon
Yes, I'm preparing to gripe about the new MovableType 3.0 release and Six Apart's blatant money-grab.
I think the main points have already been covered: the free version limits you to 1 author/3 weblogs, large blogging environments will be forced to pay $699 for the big license, etc. Here's what hasn't been said, that's bothering me:
1. They admit this is not a feature release and that they want developers to come up with new extensions. So, for the privilege of doing 6A's job for them, developers get to shell out a few hundred bucks. That makes no sense to me at all. If you want the community to contribute, you have to make it freely available - i.e., open source.
2. The new styles suck...hard. They are all the same except for color. Even Blogger has better layouts. Again, they want us to do all the work, and pay for the privilege.
3. There has been quite a movement within the community to use MT as a total site management tool. Many such schemes involve creating additional blogs within MT to segregate the content. However, by limiting the number of blogs in each license, and pricing the licenses prohibitively, Ben and Mena are basically saying that they don't want their software to be used this way.
I have more than 5 blogs in MT right now, even though I only use one as an actual blog. Thus, I have to pay over 100 bucks to upgrade. All this for a few personal sites that get no visitors and make no money at all. Hell, if they did make money I'd have to pay 299 for a commercial license. So much for micropayments.
4. I wonder if this is an attempt to get small time bloggers to use TypePad instead, thereby producing a steady income for 6A.
5. I used to be on the MT users mailing list. The last note I received from them was the alpha release announcement. I wouldn't have even known about the new release if it weren't such big news everywhere today. Why did they stop using the mailing list?
That is all.
Posted by Laura at May 13, 2004 10:49 AM