I wanted to go over a few thoughts I had on Movable Type as well as respond to Anil’s comments:
1. Well, there’s new stuff from 2.64 to 3.0, and we’ll have a bunch more new features in the general release that’s a free upgrade for 3.0 users. So new stuff is definitely something you can still have on MT, particularly if you play with some of the plugins at mt-plugins.org.
This may be true, but 3.0 is the version with the new paid licenses and there is not much new from 2.64 to 3.0 as far as I could tell. So, the fact that the general release is a free upgrade for paid 3.0 users does not sway me much. Most of the new features I have seen should be regarded more as improvements and upgrades of exisiting features, the comment management for example.
3. I’ve been to Austin a few times and it seems like a fairly reasonably priced town. (Certainly compared to New York City or San Francisco) so I’m curious about what you pay for the other applications you use, like your operating system, word processor, email client, or graphics apps. If you could contrast how the other apps you use every day are priced, and how many users they allow per license, that’d be helpful for me to see if we’re giving you what oyu need.
Okay, maybe I’m a cheapskate or just thrifty, but for Windows I paid for the Educational License which cost me five bucks for Windows XP at UT. My office suite is also from UT and cost five dollars per disk. For email I use webmail (on my webhost, isp, and from gmail) and Outlook from the office suite. For graphics applications, suffice to say that I cannot afford Photoshop. So, MT would effectively cost me more than any of my other software combined, although my case may be special. There are always cheap alternatives for those willing to invest the time and effort. Now, you could ask why don’t I just use the MT personal license which is free for blogs with one author?
This is not effective in my case because I sometimes set up blogs for friends of mine on my server at no cost to them. I create their on my particular installation of Movable Type, so this makes creating free blogs easy (no additional MT install on a separate server) and with multiple authors I just need to set them as the author for their blog created on my MT install and output the content to a subdirectory on my webserver. To do this with the new license I would need to buy one of the 70$-100$ licenses. That means no more free and easy blogs for people I know unless I’d like to violate the license. They’d have to either go the Blogger, Livejournal, Xanga, Typepad route or get their own webhosting space and try to set up MT themselves. The decision to restrict the personal edition to one author goes against the goal of promoting community. While it is true that WordPress is limited to one blog per install, as you point out, this is not a legal limitation arbitrarily put in place by the developers. WordPress could theoretically be built out to support multiple blogs.
In closing, I think Six Apart should be careful how they pursue their aim to promote Movable Type as the central pillar of their burgeoning e-business. Movable Type users are largely different from people who use Blogger, Livejournal, etc. Due to the minor technical hurdles to setting up Movable Type such as ftping files, installing scripts, editing templates, etc. most MT users are relatively technically saavy. They are more likely to have their own servers and webspace. This makes them more aware of how complex a product like MT may be and gives them a better idea of its value. Furthermore, MT users are more aware of alternatives to MT, which makes them more independent and fair game for the competition. Most importantly, the same people who currently add value and extend the functionality of Movable Type by developing plugins could easily work toward developing a successor to Movable Type. Raising the prices for licenses and changing the rules of the game could have just that effect. All things being considered, I think the main sticking point will turn out to be that the licensing scheme (namely the price) is unrealistic and out of line with market alternatives.
You raise a good point here at the end, and I should mention that anybody who joins our developer network gets a free commercial license, so we’re defintely interested in rewarding people who develop plugins, extensions, or customizations to MT.
And yeah, we’re giving away a lot of really nice prizes to developers, too. :)