mt release
ive been trying all day to formulate my thoughts on the new movable type release and its accompanying pricing structure.
many people are very upset about the pricing, as can be evidenced by the nasty trackbacks on menas announcement as well as the sniveling at metafilter (though that is what they do best).
i, personally, do not see anything wrong with charging for movable type. the program is robust, versatile, and whoops ass as far as im concerned. i would happily pay six apart for the use of this great publishing platform.
however, what i am concerned with is the asking prices for the personal licenses: $100, $150, and $190 (the introductory prices are lower for limited time). i would have little difficulty with those if they were lower. most of what makes those figures hard to swallow are the limits on weblogs and users in those personal licenses.
the largest personal license, at a heart-attack inducing $190, only allows up to 9 authors and 10 weblogs. while i have less than 10 blogs, melissas site is open to her friends and family; there are currently 16 people signed up as authors. and while most of them are not exceedingly active, they still want the opportunity to share a memory or the struggle they are having with grieving her loss.
to allow 16 authors (not counting those who might want to sign up in the future - we have a big family, and she had a ton of friends), i would need to have the largest commercial license. which would run me a nice and solid $700.
that is more than my monthly rent.
i cannot afford $700.
and i cannot morally ask my family and melissas friends to each donate over $40 to keep the site up and running on the new platform.
with the one author and three blog limit attached to the free version, i will be (just) able to use it for this domain and for my photolog.
We would recommend that, if you're not the type of person who likes to tinker with Movable Type or would require a installation, you hold off until the general release.i can only hope that this 'general release' spoken of will be more useful to me. until then, i will be sticking with the last release i installed (2.64). that is more promising than asking my not-so-computer-literate family to learn a completely new platform for posting.
--Mena Trott, It's About Time
update: looks like jason kottke is saying pretty much the same thing i am.
2 Comments
I'd prefer it if they changed the free addition to 2 authors and 3 blogs. Then I'd have nothing to complain about.
Dude. I totally support them asking for money. They deserve it. It does seem pretty damn steep though. The Microsoft Office Suite (4 programs) is like $500, Photoshop is around $600... Those are some pretty high powered programs (as is Moveable Type). For a commercial license to go for $700... they obviously think very highly of themselves.