MT 3.0: Something that makes me sigh

Looks like [MovableType]:http://www.movabletype.org 3.0’s out. It’s the blogging software I’ve been using for this site, and I’ve been quite happy with it. Unfortunately, they seem to be moving to a new licensing scheme. See their own blog entry: [Mena’s Corner: It’s About Time]:http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2004/05/its_about_time.shtml

I was kind of shocked to hear about it. I mean, really. I was looking around for blogging software to use a few months ago, and settled on MT because it was free, it had a lot of developer support, and it seemed flexible, extensible, and really easy-to-use. And now, I’m having second thoughts. I feel like I should’ve tried some other blogging software like [wordpress]:http://wordpress.org because I don’t know that I would’ve missed the extra cool features that MT has. The restrictions on the “free” license are pretty tight: one author, three blogs. I’ve already got two (the sideblog is a separate blog in MT). And this means I wouldn’t be able to add a friend as an author. All of a sudden, the software isn’t just “free as long as you don’t use it to make money”. It’s now “free if you don’t do much with it”. It doesn’t seem like an enormous deal for me right now, but I might want to do more later, and the licensing terms seem a little uncomfortable.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I think I’m going to have to look at migrating software. [opensourcecms]:http://www.opensourcecms.com has demos of a whole lotta blogging and cms software, so I’ll probably play with some of them when I feel like dealing with this migration thing. It will happen sooner or later– probably no more updates to the 2.661 version I’m using. Here’s to hoping I will have migrated before a security hole is revealed. Even if the community develops security patches for 2.661, it might be against the license to distribute them.

What I might do is see what the other members of the blogging community do. I should at least wait for the buzz to stabilize (since MT 3.0 was just released today). Maybe all this hubbub will cause [sixapart]:http://www.sixapart.com to rethink the licensing, but I’m betting not. Yeah… In a month or so we’ll probably have some good reviews of other blogging software, with how-to-migrate, how-to-install, differences-from-mt, etc. topics covered. I’m still new to this blogging thing– let’s see how the pros handle it first.

Check out some discussion at [stupidevilbastard]:http://stupidevilbastard.com/archives/2004/05/13/six_apart_announces_mt_30_developer_edition_limits_functionality_of_free_version_of_mt.php
or [bigpinkcookie]:http://www.bigpinkcookie.com/archives/006198.html
But again,

This has obliterated all motivation for me to tweak settings, layout, look for plugins, etc. since it looks like I’ll be moving. I’m kind of disappointed, but you know, they’re within their rights. But, this site is just a hobby of mine. I’m not serious enough about it to spend money, but I want to be able to play around with it, and if that puts me outside of a free license, then maybe I’m not the target market for MT anymore.

*Update:* At [blog.carthik.net,]:http://blog.carthik.net there’s an article about [moving from MT to WordPress.]:http://blog.carthik.net/vault/2004/05/14/movabletype-to-wordpress/
Let’s file this one away in case I decide on wordpress.

3 Comments.

  1. Something Nice Happened Today... - trackback on May 13, 2004 at 8:58 pm
  2. Stupid Evil Bastard - trackback on May 14, 2004 at 8:12 am
  3. Uh oh. Maybe MT won’t be nearly as dominant anymore..? I’ve been using wordpress myself. It’s pretty good, but I think MT does have more features, actually. I just didn’t want to bother setting up Perl things, because I’m so used to PHP.

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