twist of fait accomplis

Movable Type 3.0 is available.

I've gotta say that while the new features are intriguing, I'm not very psyched about their new licensing options, even with Mena's reasonable explanation. As a long-time supporter of Movable Type, what I've appreciated most is how Ben and Mena were very close with their users. I remember sending Ben an e-mail about Movable Type a few years back, asking him whether he thought it would be a good answer for the UA Journal. I got a personal response. A few months ago, I wrote to Six Apart to ask a simple question about corporate licensing and never got a response. Things have changed.

And to a point, I understand. Six Apart exists to make money, to spread blogging into the corporate environment, and to support personal publishing, probably in that order. But I can't help but feel that they've really gotten it wrong with their new licensing scheme. Perhaps it's because as it is now, I'm using a registered version of MT (that means I voluntarily donated back in the day) to maintain a total of 11 different blogs. I can do so freely, set up more copies, and publish to as many other blogs as I wish. Under the new pricing structure, there's not even a pricing structure that would support me. The closest (which supports ten blogs) is $150. $150. That's a lot of money.

There's been a lot of negative feedback thusfar about the pricing scheme and people discussing jumping ship to other blogging tools. Wordpress or Text Pattern, perhaps? It should be noted that a free, unsupported of Movable Type will continue to exist, with a one author, three blog limitation (is that per-installation, I wonder?).

I'm really not sure about what the future of Movable Type and Six Apart is. I'm pretty crappy when it comes to business-related issues (if you saw the tax return for my LLC, you'd agree). All I know is that this marks the official shift away from the cozy little company of two that birthed Movable Type and toward more standard business-centric (versus user-centric) practices. I wish them the best of luck, especially Ben and Mena because they're both such nice people, but I definitely don't see myself upgrading to MT 3.0.