10:50 PM
Internet Moveable Type: RIP

Wow. Guess I won't be upgrading my MT blogs ever again. I'll just make do with v2.6, it works just fine for me and I sure don't need to be forking over hundreds of dollars for something that's not even really an upgrade from what I have now.

Moveable Type's new pricing structure

I don't have a problem with them charging for v3 but the "personal" license fees are a joke, not only in the amount of money they want but also in the number of authors and weblogs allowed. My brother and I run a blog for our comments on TV shows, just for both of us to be able to post on the same blog, I'd have to pay a minimum of $120 ("special" discount price). *coughchokegag* Even the price of the single author/three blogs is more than I'd pay, $70 for the "special" discount and $100 normally? Thank you very much but no thanks.

Here's an excellent post at the Many to Many site. Excellent points made, and I see many of the people in the comments on Mena's blog (see link in the Many to Many post) are in the same boat as me, running personal blogs for themselves, their family and their friends and there's no way they can shell out that much money.

It's just not realistic for Six Apart to expect people to fork ove that much money when there are various alternatives that are *free*. Blogger's just improved their site, added commenting, profiles, they're mainly going after Live Journal but they're also a good alternative to MT. Live Journal is even a good alternative to MT, especially for people with personal blogs, it's designed for that and LJ recently removed the requirement of a sign up code so anyone can join now. WordPress is free GNU open source license and allows for multiple authors, I'd looked at it before and liked it but since I was happy with MT, I didn't do anything with it (but I will be installing it now and trying it out). Textpattern has also been mentioned, I haven't checked it out yet but I definitely will be. There's also SimplePHPBlog which I found yesterday, I see that kewl.us has started up a service offering free blogs using that software (it's free GNU open source license) and free 1 gig webmail accounts too.

I daresay that MT will survive and they may even change their pricing structure (although I don't expect that they will reduce it significantly enough that I would consider it) but they sure have managed to find the perfect way to piss off a whole lot of people all at once in the meantime.