MT 3.0.
Oh, hey, guess I’m sticking with MovableType 2.661 for a bit. —It’s not that I begrudge them their lucre and it’s not that I think software must (necessarily) be free or something like that; it’s just that I’m a cheap bastard. I mean, Jesus H. Christ in a jumped-up sidecar, the price breaks: $69.95 is steep enough, but that’s the introductory price. It jumps to $99.95 at some point after that. —It is still available for free, yes, but you’re limited to three blogs off one installation, and it only looks like I have two blogs running in MT: I actually have five, since three feed sideblogs to the other two.
I think maybe it’s time to bite the bullet and climb under the Textpattern hood to see what’s what.
And you know, the price breaks make even less sense when you consider the ever-growing popularity—and visibility—of group blogs.
Just to expand on the above point: two of the most popular and visible standard-bearers in the ever-growing trend toward group blogs are Crooked Timber and the Panda’s Thumb. Both of them run on MT. Both of them now face the following choice:
- stick with MT 2.661 until the cows come home,
- port their blogging and archives over to a different system, or
- pay $600 now, or $700 later, for software they’ve been using for free, or supporting with donations—
- and even then, the Panda’s Thumb would have to cut loose five authors to fit the top-end restriction. (Should they really be forced to get that Darwinian?)
Yes, SixApart is trying to account for the big companies that are using MT for things quite other than blogging, and that’s fine, go team! But the way they’ve gone about it—distinguishing personal from commercial uses primarily by the number of authors and blogs involved—leaves a big fat slice of their enthusiastic amateur base in the dust. Their prerogative; then, you can toss the baby with the bathwater whenever you want, so long as no literal baby is involved. There’s not a great alternative blogging tool (that I know of) which allows multiple blogs and multiple authors with such ease. Yet. —There will be, soon enough.
Oh, hey, more! Shelley over at Burningbird compiles a list of reasons why, even if I did only have three blogs, I couldn’t use the free MT 3.0: as it currently stands, you have to be registered with TypeKey to download it (which isn’t a prospect that thrills me), and you’re only allowed one installation on one CPU—and I have no idea how that fits with my hosting company. More phone calls and emails with technical support would be called for, with the possibility that I’d have to move everything elsewhere anyway (after further calls with their technical support, etc. etc.). Why hassle? My path is clear: 2.661 > some other solution. What fun!
One last update, and then I’m putting this topic to bed: Dean Peters has some very thoughtful things to say on why, exactly, there’s been such an uproar, and sketches an alternate pricing plan that would have made nary a ripple with me, at least (and not just because it’s cheaper, peanut gallery).
Maybe you should give http://wordpress.org a shot too. I'm loving it.
I've been really happy with Textpattern so far, for what it's worth.
Hi
Well, I'm keeping a weather eye on Blogger, which has gotten more interesting of late (I'm using it for my Celtic blog/Scéla), but I plan to stay with MT 2.66 for a bit. WordPress and TextPattern are both intriguing--as is Bloxom. MT 3.0, not so much. I also note that a couple of hosting services, like bloghosts.com, let you try out a variety of blogging tools/systems if you host there.
Movable Type 3.0
Just before I went to bed last night I read a post at Burning Bird about changes in Movable Type,...
Timothy Appnel Doesn't Get It : Adding to the MT 3.0 debate
Timothy Appnel's article O'Reilly Network: Movable Type 3.0 and Eating. [May. 13, 2004] has created a hot debate about what he calls the dismissible outcries of the ranting loons that use MT and do not understand why SixApart has done nothing wrong wit...
Los días de mi blog en MT están contados.
Movable Type 3.0 ya ha salido con nuevas opciones de licenciamiento que no incentiva la actualización. Para manejar mis blogs personales voy a necesitar invertir USD $149.95 en una herramienta que es buena pero que tiene competencia importante en WordP...
One potential disadvantage of WordPress, if you're running five blogs. is that it doesn't support multiple blogs--you can have multiple blogs, but you have to use a separate installation of WordPress for each one. Multiple blogs under the same installation is a planned feature (and when it's implemented, I believe there will be a convenient method for combining multiple installations into one).
Other than that, it's an excellent tool, and it has the distinct advantage over MT and Blogger that it uses dynamically generated rather than static HTML documents.
I had gotten interested in Textpattern even before the MT pricing structure came out & I now have a testblog up & running. I think Txp will be my primary blogging tool very soon. I'm going to need to support multiple blogs, but I'm willing to wait. The Txp user interface is simple, intuitive, elegant.
For several years, I've believed that webloggers were past due a move to open source. Even aside from the question of finances, there's longevity: years of published text can be made inaccessible on the whims of a few individuals, and any improvements made by volunteer programmers are thrown away rather than consolidated. MT's ambiguous licensing has been one factor in the inability of open source candidates to gain much momentum. I hope that pattern changes, and WordPress looks like a good bet to help.
Or they can stick with 2.6x for as long as they like while they shop around for something they like better. After all, the 2.6 versions aren't going to explode when the timer goes off or nuthin'.
I gotta say that the whole brou-ha-ha seems more than a mite bit wanky to me (unsurprisingly, in fact, it's now made otf_wank). Movable Type was never open source software in the first place.
Even if, inexplicably enough, a huge number of Open Source wankheads did favor it.
Ah. And there's the rub, eh? O, the cognitive dissonance! It burnssss us, precious!
Heh. Well, okay. So I'm just plain mean. But I do get the sense that much of the outrage (if by no means all of it) has a hell of a lot more to do with people's own issues over the relative perceived status--or "cred," or whatever--of different types of software than it does over anything else.
Oh, and forgot to add...
Then, I should probably mention that I didn't even bother to get a CD player until somewhere around the year 2000.
So that whole interest in being possessed of the Newest and Latest (tm) is probably just not one that I grok very well.
more on Movable Type 3.0...
I previously chimed in here. Since then, so have lots of others, and so has Six Apart, where Mena has commented on the controversies and noted some clarifications and updates to the licensing. Good for them for being understanding about the underlying ...
It is still available for free, yes, but you’re limited to three blogs off one installation, and it only looks like I have two blogs running in MT: I actually have five, since three feed sideblogs to the other two.
Actually, this has been clarified. Those "extra blogs" used to create features within a single blog don't count as blogs in and of themselves for the purposes of the restriction on the number of blogs. So if you had 50 blogs set up within MT, but they're just providing features into one "weblog site" then it's kosher.
Also, the CPU thing was an error. It was standard licensing boilerplate that someone forgot to remove when cutting and pasting the license together from a standard licensing document, apparently.
MT Licensing
With all the hubbub being created around MT3.0's new pay-licensing schemes, I thought I would finally finish this post and put it out there. A few weeks back, after I had started building my site using MT, I noticed this...