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Well the fine folks over at SixApart just completely pulled the rug out from under MovableType users everywhere!

First the good news:
The new version of MovableType has been released. Dubbed MovableType 3.0 Developers Edition. Simply put, it's an extended beta edition of MovableType 3.0. Now that they've cleared out the worst of the bugs they're dumping it out to the public. The idea being that developers of plugins and such can now start working on updating their stuff to work with the new version. That way when they release a "real" version there won't be the lag time between their software being out and the plugins and extensions getting updated.

Now the bad news:
SixApart also released their "new" licensing and pricing structure. What's so bad you might ask? MovableType has just made the switch from being so called "donation-ware" to being a commercial product. Their license and price structures basically screw the pooch for anyone but the bare minimalist MT user.

There are now basically 7 levels of licensing available.
1) Free - Limits you to 1 author and 3 blogs
2) Personal Edition ($99.95) - 3 authors and 5 blogs
3) Personal Edition volume license 1 ($149.95) - 6 authors and 8 blogs
4) Personal Edition volume license 2 ($189.95) - 9 authors and 10 blogs
5) Commercial Edition 1 ($299.95) - 5 authors and 5 blogs
6) Commercial Edition 2 ($699.95) - 20 authors and 15 blogs
7) Custom license (must contact company for prices)

Those prices are outright ludicrous and I know I sure won't be upgrading. Oh sure currently I only have 1 author and 2 blogs so I could get away with the free version. However, I refuse to upgrade on the principal of the situation! Previous versions were free and they asked for donations. I know you can't run a business on donation but at the same time to do a complete 180 turn without warning is horrible. They never even gave warning this would happen.

In the many months they never once mentioned that they planned to start charging for MT. You would think in all the time they had they could at least be nice enough to give everyone a heads up. I suspect they didn't because they knew it would bite them in the backside. Lets be honest here folks. It was the MT user community that helped develop this new version. It was our cries for fixes to problems, out hard work doing alpha and beta testing, our hard work developing plugins to extend the software, and our work in doing the leg work in advertising and converting people to MT. Why did we do all this? Because we loved this wonderful free piece of software. And what is out thanks from SixApart? Getting reamed in the behind!

I guess no one saw it coming. I just always assumed MovableType would remain free since SixApart had their TypePad service. TypePad is a paid hosted blogging service. I just figured that's where they would make their money so they could offer the free version of MT. There had been some talk of a MT Pro version that would cost. The idea being the Pro version would contain many of the features found in TypePad.

So what's the future of this blog? I really don't know yet. For now I'll be sticking with MT 2.661. It works fine for what I need right now. As I've stated in past posts I've done lots of work to automate the backend maintenance of the blog. I really don't want to have to convert to something new and start all over right now. I'll be keeping an eye out for open source and freeware blog software though. If something fancies me I might make the switch over. If not perhaps I'll just create my own system.

So thanks for nothing SixApart! I used to think you were a decent company that actually cared about the blogging community. Boy were we wrong!