I did a bit of digging on their site—there are different levels of personal licenses which are slightly closer to the realm of the sane than $600, but they are still ridiculously priced. $150 for 10 blogs and nine authors, and beyond that you have to contact them for a quote.

I run two sites powered by MT - and I’d be looking at *at least* $250 in licenses, and who knows how long those licenses will last until they release a “major” upgrade that you have to pay again for?

I should be clear - both my sites are personal and make absolutely no money. Somehow though I’m expected to pull $250 out of thin air.

Well, we don’t have to upgrade do we? Like the install I have now, I won’t be forced to dump it and buy something will I? I know this sounds dumb but really, will I?

No, luckily you won’t, at least until someone discovers a security vulnerability in MT 2.6x and SixApart decides the fix is to upgrade to MT3.

And you know it will happen.

I found the same page you did… They don’t seem to have a personal-use license that accounts for any use of more than 9 authors.

And even if I did the “10 weblogs, 9 or fewer authors” personal use license, and convinced everyone per blog to use shared-accounts to post from, it’d still be $150.

Nope, sorry. Not gonna happen. Time to grab a copy of 2.661 for the archives “just in case” but I’ll be sticking with 2.5 for now….

Well, when that happens, I’ll just go blogger again. At least they aren’t forcing people to dump current installs. That would suck.

I run a website which has been extensively built up around MoveableType 2.x, at http://www.alittlepoison.com. MoveableType was a free blogging suite that had the scale and customisation to suit are needs. Let me introduce myself, I am 23 and on a very limited income. The website is a non-profit site on which 8 of my friends and I put up art-related posts, images and music.

I am now looking for alternative, free blogging suite to replace Moveable Type. Such a demand will logically be fulfilled, in time, by others. Far fewer people will construct websites around MT with the new price, and enthusiasm for MoveableType’s third party development (ie by those who program plug-ins in their free time - the MT Plugin Directory) will dwindle.

Tis a shame, yeah?

Indeed it is a shame. The irony is that this actually makes one of their main competitors, pMachine Pro, seem ridiculously reasonable price-wise. For $45 you can purchase a personal license for pMachine Pro and have unlimited authors and blogs once again. Hell, for that matter their new Expression Engine non-commercial license is $149 and allows unlimited blogs and authors with a buttload more features to boot.

But $99.95 for 3 authors and 5 blogs for a version that doesn’t come with a mess-load of new features? When did Ben and Mena start on their crack addiction? I about fell out of my chair when I saw that. I double checked the caldendar to make sure it wasn’t April 1st. I’m seriously not against paying for a good blog package, but Six Apart has given me every good reason to make that payment to their competitors at this point.

Man, I hope the version of WordPress supporting multiple blogs isn’t too far off. I’ll probably move SEB to Drupal, but the most of the rest of my blogs are maintained by folks like my mom, my sister, my kid, and my wife all of whom don’t need Drupal’s level of power and would be confused by it’s greater complexity.

Perhaps I am too cynical, but for me one of the most telling points is the removal of recently updated support from the free version.  It’s not that it’s an important feature, or even a particularly useful one.  It’s fine if they stop taking donations now.  But how hard would it have been to leave it in there for people who donated in the past, but might still not need more than the free version, as a gesture of goodwill?  These people, after all, paid for something they didn’t have to pay for, just because they liked it, and contributed their part, however small, to keeping the company alive long enough to reach version 3.0…

Ugh. What a great surprise first thing in the morning. To keep things the way they are currently setup on my system I would have to buy the $200 licence. Ugh.. The worst part of all of this is that i was recently brought into the beta program and have already installed 3.0c.

I *knew* that I should of downloaded an old copy of 2.661 to keep for my archives. Now I’m screwed. I’ll either have to pay to upgrade, find an old copy of 2.661 kicking around somewhere, or move to another platform. $200 for a personal journal is just too much.

Something occurred to me while I was commenting on someone else’s blog (here: http://www.jasonlefkowitz.net/moveabletype/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=1135).

It’s interesting to note that they so recently went on record saying that 3.0 would not be the “fabled MT Pro” release. Yet they certainly are trying to charge a crapload more than I think anyone would have expected to pay for MT Pro, and this isn’t even a “feature” release!

I haven’t used MT for quite awhile but when I read about this, I was a little irritated.  It appears, and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, that MT, as well as other companies, such as pM, are no longer interested in the average blogger and prefer to cater more towards high-end and commercial users.  Nice.  I would rather go back to Blogger (shudder) than pay for MT.  I have been using Wordpress for awhile now and am very happy with it.  I, too, am hoping for a multi-blog funcionality sometime soon.  Maybe the MT situation will help push it along?

Heh, if the WordPress people are smart that’s the first thing they do after 1.2 comes out (next week, according to their site).

I don’t have a problem paying for MT - I donated in the past - but I have a problem with such high prices. You may be right. Maybe they’re hoping people think TypePad suddenly isn’t such a bad deal and migrate there.

I think the pricing levels (especially for the personal levels, which is where the grass roots enthusiasm for the product has come from and would have continued as the push to sell to businesses expands) are a big mistake. 

MT is not sufficiently user-friendly that casual bloggers (who would find the free license sufficient to at least their initial needs) will be able to use it.  If the more experienced crowd bails (as I think is likely), there won’t be anyone to bring in the newbies.  At which point, the whole grass roots dies.

I think there are folks who would pay $100 or $200 for a personal, non-commericial license—with no limitations.  That theoretically allows some license abuse by companies, but it’s a relatively low price to pay for a solid product.  Coupling a big price imposition with no new features and new significant limitations on use of the product (authors, blogs) adds insult to injury.

Ironically, it occured to me the other day that there were a lot of things I was using MT and blogs for that could be done as easily via a wiki.  Not a personal journal, but a lot of relatively-static things that I used MT for as an easy web site manager.  This only reinforces that inclination.

I am blown away by the error in Ben and Meena’s ways… I was not against TypeKey, I love them, but this is a mistake and I hope they quickly realize this.

I guess open-source is the way to go for those of us who run non-profiteering websites. Has anyone had any experience with Drupal? ( http://drupal.org/ )

Call it misplaced loyalty, if you will, but I don’t see this as profiteering, but profit (as in, “earning a living”) definitely seems to be behind it.  I just think the pricing structure and/or license limitations is wildly out of whack.

I’m with ***Dave on this one. I can’t fault MT for wanting to make some money and I’m not opposed to spending it for good software, but this is just silly when you look at what others are offering for similar prices.

As for Drupal, I’ve been playing with it here and there and currently have a test install of it running here.

If you want to try it out without installing it go to Open Source CMS.com. It’s a site specifically for testing out all manner of open source web packages including many CMS systems, blogging packages, and message boards. You can log into the admin sections and play around.

Multiple blogs is very much on the WordPress developer’s minds.

I’m a little surprised at the response here.  I can barely keep up with my one blog, and three would be too many.  My host charges for hosting more than three blogs on one account anyhow.

I think there are many, many bloggers out there who use MT to publish just one blog.  This may not be the case with you guys, but I think it’s a little rash to say that Six Apart has turned its back on the average blogger just from this new development.

It’s hard to say who the average blogger is, but certainly a vocal, activist, supportive part of their community (including folks who have been doing plug-in development for them) are the sorts who will be strongly impacted by this.  Ditto for folks who host blogs for other people, and folks who host collaborative blogs.

Of my multiple blogs, I could consolidate most of them into one (though the collaborative gaming blog would have to go away), and turn others of them into static content, and maybe get under the free limit.  But, frankly, why is 6A making doing that?  What do I gain?  What do they gain?  In both cases, it’s nothing.

Tom it’s true that the the vast majority of bloggers out there don’t need a whole lote more than what the new free version of MovableType will offer and if they’re happy with that then I fully encourage them to make use of it.

At the same time, folks like myself who do make use of the extra functionality have been among MT and Six Apart’s staunchest supporters in the past. I’ve not only donated money to SA for MT, but I’ve been involved in the beta testing of MovableType 3.0 which was a donation of my time and familiarity with their product. It’s not unreasonable that I and others like me might be feeling a tad bit betrayed at this point.

This pricing scheme is more inline with what I might expect for MovableType Pro and SA has already said that MT3 isn’t MT Pro, yet they’re pricing it as though it were. I don’t think there isn’t anyone out there who doesn’t appreciate what MT has provided them in the past nor do they begrudge the fact that SA needs to make some money off of MT for a change, but they’ve really jumped the shark on this one.

This news is upsetting me. I’ve invested a lot of learning and time on MT and now knowing I can’t afford it, makes me sad.

So now, we have to make a list of possible replacements of MT:

Drupal
Wordpress
TextPattern
pMachine

Seems to be the top four I’m considering right now… the sad this is that I’ve put so much freaking TIME on MT and learning it, that I’m frustrated I have to re-do the entire process…

And hell with Blogger’s redesign/restructure, TextPad is going to get a run for its money.

pMachine is a good system. However, I’m still quite happy with phpBB. There is a script out there that accesses the database in phpBB and allows you to present the posts in a more bloglike fashion. phpBB_Fetch_All does all this and also allows you to create forms for entering posts and comments to post to the phpBB back-end as well. I haven’t done this part yet because I’m happy with using phpBB to make posts and for users to post comments.

I can understand the MT people wanting to make some money off of their hard work, but really, limiting the number of authors and blogs seems a little out there.

One thing for sure, for what they are asking, they had better get the comment spam problem fixed or they are going to loose a lot of users to other systems.

The only problem I have had with phpBB is people creating user accounts that point to porn sites and such. I know they are doing this by hand and not with bots because I have a thing to force someone to put in a number seen in an image that a bot wouldn’t be able to read. I only see these about once a month these days, but still…

I wonder if we will start seeing less and less “Made by Moveable Type” images at the bottom of blogs soon…

I may be a temporary thing but the trackbacks on Mena’s site are gone. The support site a MT is off the air also.. I wonder if they are in damage control mode.