Everyone is going crazy over the release of Movable Type 3.0. Some people have flamed Six Apart, accusing them of deception, smuggling drugs, and killing baby seals.

I’m not happy with the way things turned out, I think this was a bad business decision, and I certainly believe Six Apart could use some help with public relations. However, I think this company has every right to attempt to change their business model, and when it upsets their user community, we have every right to take our business elsewhere.

It’s obvious that Six Apart has refocused its core approach to the blogging business. Timothy Appnel repeated a rumor that they got less than 50¢ per download; if that’s true, I can understand why they felt the need to change their licensing structure.

Movable Type was never free software, though, and a lot of bloggers seem to have missed that part. We were always forbidden from redistributing the software. Nobody was ever allowed to fork Movable Type. It was always “proprietary”, but with a very loose set of rules. Those rules are now a lot stricter, but Six Apart’s business model has not changed. It’s just been recalibrated, and I don’t think they’ve done a great job.

The new Six Apart is two products: TypePad and Movable Type. If you’re a regular blogger and you want something quick, cheap, and flexible, get TypePad. If you’re a “power user” who plans on using Movable Type as a development platform or extended CMS (as many people have done), then there is an expectation that you’ll be able to pay for the privilege of using it.

For the record, I’m not upgrading to MT 3.0 unless the licensing system changes. Right now I manage three blogs (Cogito and Natasha’s two blogs), and I plan on starting more fairly soon (including a moblog, once I can afford picture messaging). This disqualifies me from the free version (maximum of one author and three weblogs), and the next step up (five authors, five weblogs) is $70 — and soon to be $100. I simply can’t afford that, and I think 2.x works well enough for the time being.

While I wish Mena and Ben the best of luck in their business, if I were in their shoes, I would’ve done things a lot differently. Part of the reason MT is such a good development platform is because it has a wide user base and a very large community of plugin developers. Many of the people in this community cannot (or are simply unwilling to) pay high fees for software which is heavily commoditized. There are dozens of blogging systems out there, and some (like WordPress) are actively courting MT users. Converting from one system to another is easy enough; Mark Pilgrim has already done it, and his site was one of the most complex MT installations I’ve seen.

I suppose the folks at Six Apart figured they could ignore this “middle band” of their user community, keeping only the very hard-core developers on MT and the very lightweight users on MT Free or TypePad. My own belief is that the people who can no longer justifiably use MT 3.0 are actually the ones who did most of the active development of MT plugins and extensions, and that cutting these folks off is tantamount to suicide by stagnation. (Many other bloggers agree.) Time will tell; I’d like to think Six Apart did research before landing on this specific licensing scheme, and that they have a clear view of where their business is headed. But that’s not always a given.

As for me, I’m part of the “middle band” that Six Apart has thumbed its nose at. I run my own web server, I need my own installation (not some blogs.com subdomain) and I need flexibility as well. Yet I can’t justify spending hundreds of dollars for MT 3.0 when there are so many equally powerful alternatives, available for free — not free as in beer, but free as in speech.

Moving forward, I’d like to use a system that I know I’ll be able to upgrade without additional restrictions. WordPress seems to have a fairly good user community, but it’s PHP, and that grates on my sensibilities. (Granted, MT is Perl+CGI, and that’s only slightly better.) Perhaps this will give me some incentive to finish writing my own blogging system using Nevow. We’ll see. For the time being I’m sticking to MovableType, but I’m not upgrading past 2.x — and I suspect a lot of other people will do the same.

Update: Six Apart has clarified and revised some of the licensing terms in Movable Type 3.0; as I’d expected, it was not just refocusing their business model, but also a really bad PR job. Nonetheless, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of reason for me to upgrade any time soon. My current setup works well already; I’ll wait for the “real” release of MT3 before deciding whether to migrate to a truly free platform or stay with theirs (or roll my own).