I was surprised to see such a quick and thorough response from Anil Dash about my previous ranty post about MovableType’s plans. I don’t have any time right now to write further, just suffice to say that I am impressed by his communication here and it makes me think better of everyone involved at SixApart because I know they are trying sincerely to address user concerns, not just here. Thank you especially Anil. That being said here is what he had to say to my points:
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Hmm, I figured I should respond to a few of these items to see if I can help clarify what your’e looking for.
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.
2. Eh, don’t worry, not all of us at Six Apart like cute. I’m curious what specifically you mean (this is basically a company full of people who *weren’t* popular in high school) but I’ll let you give me more info on that.
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.
3. I think we’re doing exactly what you’re saying. We’ve got a free version of MT that even lets you have Google AdSense ads or Amazon affiliate links, even if you *don’t* pay. That sounds even better than what you asked for. And then, yep, we ask commercial users to pay. And in the meantime we’re building out TypePad.
But a lot of our MT users said they wanted to be able to just file a simple help ticket when they have a problem or question, and get a quick answer, and the new paid licenses for MT let us do that.
As far as I know, there aren’t any serious bugs in the 2.661 version of MT. And users who are on 2.661 that are eligible for the free license can upgrade to MT3 for free if they want the new features.
4. If you’re concerned about limitations in the software, WordPress does have an open license, but doesn’t let you have multiple blogs without installing the app multiple times. It seemes like one’s a legal restriction and one’s a code restriction, and I can only speak for Movable Type, but we’ve got a way for you to lift the legal restrictions just by buying a license.
I hope this helps answer some of the issues you’ve raised, and feel free to shoot me an email if you have any other questions.