Mercurial

Movable Type 3.0 is evil. It was a great shock to see today the news from SixApart about their new Movable Type Developers Edition. With new, complete evil price structure and blog and author limitations.
They have gone the corporate route, with a product that was enhanced and made what it is by having a big fan base and a big set of plug-ins that allowed the users to add functionality and flexibility.
All this is gone now. No developer is going to help a product that charges $600; if SixApart decides to have a Microsoft price fixing structure, they might as well develop their product themselves.

How wrong is this license and pricing structure? Let me count the ways:

1. Absurdly low limits on the amount of authors allowed. MT has made its name precisely in the amount of people that can post to communal blogs, even thought they might publish once every three months. As an editor, I am not paying $600 so John Smith (Or Kurt Vonnegut) can post once in a while. And what about content read by a few authors / readers? Every author is a reader, and MT was a place to post restricted readership news. Not anymore.

2. Impossible limit on the number of blogs allowed. If, as Phil Ringnalda said on occasion, MT can be configured to have many blogs on the same page, all of them attending to a particular facet of the same group of authors. Then, we simply have a diverse set of categories and attributes that we could configure to serve our particular purposes.
2. Example: Say, for the sake of argument, that I have a corporate blog because I like the functionality. 30 authors, geographically distributed, on numerous issues and a rather simple implementation. Probably five or six blogs on one server, keeping track of events, links, news etc. If I had bought the commercial version of 2.661 then I would have had, for US$150, my blogs with all the plug-ins. Now, by spending $600, I now face limitations, incompatibility with plug-ins and can not use the authors I had before. What gives? Especially in a corporate setting, in which author privileges are often given according to hierarchical consideration, and managers need to access the blog - even though they might not post.

3. False commitment to free product. The license says somewhere "no access to fee-based services", without elaborating further. What are those fee-based services? I could think that a plug-in against spam, such as the one Jay Allen developed could count as one. Or the increasingly annoying Typekey, for registering comments.

4. The licensing and pricing structure destroys the generous developer community that enhanced MT beyond its original value. It was very close to open source, and people loved it. There are multiple companies out there playing with open source software, offering ideas and simply waving their software in front of us, not asking for money and not placing any limitations on the number of authors or blogs.

5. Appropriate for the 85% of the user population. Now, this is just statistics for "average user", where it is clear that the enhancements and increases in functionality come from the people that push the envelope and make this little tiny fixes, the plug-ins, the made the product such a magnificent tool.

6. It comes at a time when other developers are getting hip to the idea of nanopublishing, and thus offering more and more options. Enter WordPress, drupal, Textpattern and the big contender, Blogger.

7. Confusing messages, people exploring options and shift toward WordPress, couple people talking about developing their own CMS, others uncomfortable with the proposed structure, etc. This announcement has angered a lot of the people that have significantly contributed to the development and diffusion of MT; while it was never Open Source, it was nevertheless an excellent product for its money. However, the author/blog restrictions and personal licensing price are an indication that SixApart has been absolutely disconnected from their community.

8. If the idea is to go the Microsoft route, and start charging dearly for the proprietary software, why make it so that it has to be installed with open source software? Right now I have php, mySQL, Apache, phpmyAdmin and MT in my server; if I have to pay for MT, what is stopping me from installing WordPress or whatever else open source CMS is out there? I have already done the hard work!

In conclusion, it seems as if with this release MT wanted to sell their company value (are they planning to sell?) and increase the possibility of revenues in the near future, without minding the definite impact that their price structure is going to have on their users. Other issue that comes to mind is the definite orientation toward corporate services instead of simple users, while banking on the work done by the community. Right now so many issues are in the air that upgrading to MT3.0 is highly doubtful, and even putting it to work in a corporate setting might be risky. The new product simply lacks community backing and a definite future.

MT, we hardly knew you.