The pricing scheme accompanying MT 3.0 isn’t as disastrous as it seemed, after a clarification by SixApart — though it remains “expensive”. I’m waiting for the dust to settle before I decide if I upgrade to MT 3.0, move to WordPress, or stay with MT 2.661.
So, finally, it seems everything is not as bad as everybody has been thinking.
I don’t personally care much about what was “miscommunicated” or what was simply changed by SixApart. What I care about is that instead of my previous calculation which brought the licensing fees I would have had to pay to use the new version of Movable Type for my current/ongoing projects to $600, I would now probably manage with the Personal Edition 13 authors license for $150. Mind you, it’s still expensive for me, but it’s not ludicrous anymore.
SixApart have also clarified what they mean by “weblog” in their licensing restrictions: a weblog is a site powered by Movable Type. If you use 5 different “system weblogs” to make up your site, it’s still just one weblog. I find this pretty reassuring. If the personal license you bought is missing a few authors/weblogs to make you happy, you can add individual licenses for $10 each (per extra author or weblog).
What am I going to do? Since the uproar yesterday, I’ve been doing two things: waiting for the dust to settle (and trust me, there is still a lot of it in the air) and, like others, looking pretty closely at WordPress.
When I left Blogger at the beginning of this year, I had been nastily tempted by WordPress. I had given up on it at the time because it was lacking a few functionalities I wanted, MT being a more mature application. Things have changed now, and between the hierarchical categories, the bunch of really sexy CSS templates, and the fact that I can find the development team on Freenode (not even mentioning that WordPress is completely free), it is a very attractive alternative to MT for me.
But as I said above, there is no rush. I’ll give it a few weeks at least, and maybe wait for both Movable Type 3.0 (the “real” one, not the Developer Edition) and WordPress 1.2 to be out.
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