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[bryant]

So let’s take a look at the new Movable Type Personal Edition license. Not the whole thing, just excerpts. I’ll stick this in a cut so as to avoid annoying all the nice people who’re wondering when I’m gonna talk about politics or gaming again.

Except for one bit which is so funny and sad that I have to highlight it. A number of people are pointing out that we should expect to pay for good software. I completely agree. However, I also believe that software companies should be expected to write reasonable license agreements, and a license agreement that’s violated by a default installation of the software is not entirely reasonable.

You must maintain, on every page generated by the Software, an operable link to http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ , with the link text “Powered by Movable Type”, as specified by Six Apart, unless otherwise stated in the terms included with your copy of the Software.

This is ridiculous. Once I pay $70 for software, I expect to be able to use it without a credit link. I do not have to include a “generated with Microsoft Word” credit on every document I write in Word.

Also, the default Movable Type templates do not include the credit link on pages other than the front page. So just to be clear: everyone who buys the personal edition of Movable Type and installs it will be in violation of the license unless they carefully modify a minimum of ten templates.

On to the other stuff.

More...

Comments

[multiplexer.livejournal.com]

I'll repeat what I told you before, Bryant: most of dot-coms are gone, many good ones because of ridiculous pricing schemes, and Six Apart will be replaced by someone else once it folds -- perhaps with a better pricing scheme to make them money AND satisfy the user base.

With this, it is likely to lose many, many users. Considering blogging software is a market with plenty of healthy competition, the users definitely have someplace to go. Sure, it's a painful transition to another engine, but if users don't have to deal with this silliness, then they will migrate. I know I would. Or they just won't upgrade.

I don't understand why they don't have a public version and a professional version. The public version can be free (or very cheap), be fairly restrictive with number of blogs/authors, and automatically generate ads on every page. Hey, it's free, no big deal! The professional version would be unlimited blogs/unlimited authors, $70, no ads, probably some bells and whistles. Seems simple to me.

[bryant]

Yep. I worked for a top-ten website with an ad-supported business model myself.

Note that the public free version is very restrictive on the number of blogs/authors, requires a credit link on every page, and is free. But yeah, if they were charging $70 for the pro version, they'd be in good shape.

Hm. I'd make it $100 for the unlimited author/unlimited blog version (non-commercial), and if you're going commercial I'd use something like the fee structure they have now.

LiveJournal managed to pull off the "some free some paid" model very well. Six Apart shoulda paid attention.

As far as migrating -- I'm looking at possibilities. Wordpress is not going to do it for non-technical users; the templates are written in PHP and are fairly convoluted. Textpattern might be better. I'm going to report back when I'm done poking around.

[multiplexer.livejournal.com]

Then $100 for the professional version. It doesn't really matter. As long as they keep their normal user base satisfied, it makes little difference. The pricing scheme for their 80% of active users should be extremely simple.

And as for commercial, well, everyone has a weird pricing scheme for commercial. That's pretty standard.

[gentlyepigrams]

My husband and I had the same discussion. They're hitting people like me and my husband who introduced 20 or 30 people to blogging with MT very hard.

Now I can't upgrade, have to suck up a huge amount of money (more than $700 minus what I've already paid) or have to ask my friends whom I told could blog free on my site for a bunch of money to continue do so, or maybe boot them off my server. And since our next rolldown web server will be a dual 450 G4 (a consumer machine that's already 4+ years old), we'd be in violation of the personal license no matter what.

Having seen their screwup with the license fees, I can't recommend MT to my friends any more. And we'll migrate to another platform, probably an open source one to keep from getting reamed like this again.