Price to pay for MT success
Today saw the much awaited release of Movable Type 3.0, alas Six Apart have introduced a new pricing scheme that has got the whole MT community up in arms. The reason for this is the large price hike on the back of a release that only seems to differ by the fact that the comment system has been redesigned, and this I’m sure was only because of the spamming vulnerability in the previous version.
However there is still a free version available but this now comes with a restriction of only being allowed one author and three blogs, and therein lies the problem this restriction traps the user. You may never need more than one author and only ever use one blog but it’s the fact that you are being forced to pay for a possible future upgrade.
I believe that many users would not mind paying a small fee for the software as is, with no restrictions at least for non-commercial use. I bet there would have been far fewer disgruntled MT users today if a fee of say $49 dollars was asked for.
If Six Apart stick with this pricing scheme and maintain author/blog restrictions on the free version I expect MT plugin developers to dwindle vastly in number. Maybe to the point where the only plugins we see are from Six Apart themselves or 3rd parties who charge per plugin. Either way people will migrate to a similar system as is always the case. Heck you find this in open source software all the time. An yet that’s just the point Movable type has never been Open Source, its a product from a small start-up company that needs to make a profit, I just happen to think they've got their pricing scheme all wrong.
