It’s looks like my Ramblings and my (our) other blogs are going to be stuck loosely based on Movable Type version 2.63 forever. Six Apart, the creators of this terrific blogging system, have released version 3.0D and adversely updated their license agreement.
Because I have more than five authors, I’d be required to send them $100 (as of August 2004) in order to continue blogging if I downloaded a new version of the software — even the 2.661 version that was released a few months ago before the new license. And that’s even for personal, noncommercial blogs. Downloading any version of the software from their website (which requires agreeing to the new license agreement) immediately makes the five-author limit effective. I can’t even download it for evaluation. True, the three-author-limit version is only $70, but that barely covers my family as users.
I can’t blame them entirely. Six Apart is a company. It has to make money at some point. But publishing the world’s most popular and best blogging system gave them many avenues they didn’t take. I, for one, would have lowered the dollar amounts and increased the usage thresholds.
Movable Type as a whole will suffer thanks to this move.
Hey, at least I don’t have to worry about upgrade paths anymore when I’m tweaking my blogs. I can make all the modifications I want as long as I don’t distribute the changes (as per the old agreement to which I am still bound) and as long as my nifty plugins continue working.
I’ve been busy today implementing a few changes, including smilies ;-), spam comments removal, and more work on categories (not yet implemented)…
Update
I’ve since moved over to WordPress and no longer have the restrictions mentioned above. This long-thought-out decision also means a looming end to my development and continued support of my MovableType plugins.
As of November 2012, the blogs for our family and our few other related sites would rack up a whopping $495 in additional license fees just to download and install the latest major upgrade from Six Apart. So glad I switched to WordPress eight years ago!
Hey Man, do you know where I can download 2.63 from? Six Apart dont have it on their website anymore and sure as hëll dont want to use MT3. If you could email me man that would be highly apreciated.
Sorry, it’s not available anymore as for as I know. You could try asking SixApart for it, though. Unfortunately, third parties, like myself, are prohibited by the license to make the software available to others. – RDL