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So, I’m apparently a bit behind the curve here (or maybe I just ought to stop reading political blogs compulsively and add some more techie ones to my daily circuit)…seems that the eagerly-anticipated Movable Type 3.0 is out, at least in a Developer version. Meanwhile, all hell has broken loose over the licensing structure (just check out the Trackbacks to Mena Trott’s announcement).

I’ve been using Movable Type for the past year, and have been quite the little MT evangelist, even convincing Cornell’s Academic Technology Center to install it on one of their servers for a course I taught this semester. Looking ahead to the work I’ll be doing at George Mason, I’ve been thinking about ways to stretch/adopt blogs into the work of the Center for History and New Media, and Movable Type has been my default CMS, simply because it’s what I know best.

For myself, there are a few problems with the new MT licensing scheme, and like most of the people raising a stink, they center on the number of authors/number of blogs permitted by each license. I totally understand the rationale for limiting the number of blogs and/or authors covered by a personal, non-commercial license – they’re trying to bring individuals into the Typepad service, and don’t want one person with technical skills setting up blogs for dozens of his or her friends when they otherwise might subscribe to Typepad. That’s totally cool, and while I myself have been known to set up a blog or two for a friend, I can respect that.

However, here’s my concern, about which I’ve seen precious little discussion – educational/academic uses (Weblogg-ed, for example, has nothing, and the best posts I’ve been able to find are by Shane Nackerud, who’s running the UThink initiative at the University of Minnesota). For example, I’ve been planning to launch a couple of group blogs on the model of Terra Nova to focus on a few of the research topics in which I’m particularly interested. Figuring up to a dozen authors, this rapidly becomes unaffordable, especially considering that I wouldn’t necessarily have any official funding for such a project. Moreover, there’s the question of CHNM – if, say, we wanted to add a blog-like function to the tools available for historians, it now seems substantially less likely that Movable Type is a viable option.

Now, while concerning, these issues don’t seem to be such a big deal in the immediate, practical sense: as best as I can tell from rooting around through various discussions, the licensing is on the honor system and these limits aren’t hard-coded into the software. If anything, though, this is a wake-up call for me, a reminder that while the code is visible, Movable Type is by no means open source software. Six Apart has every right to do what they like with the code, and charge whatever the market will bear. They can stop passing out the free beer whenever they like, and nobody really has a leg to stand on to complain.

This all comes as I’ve been sketching out a redesign for my own site (I finally figured out an answer to the question that Jay Rosen asked me a few months ago when I met him at NYU – “Oh, you’ve got a blog? What are you trying to do there?”), and have been finding Movable Type somewhat limiting – I can kludge together lists of links/photos/ideas/etc. as separate blogs under MT, for example, but that’s kind of a pain. I was toying with the idea of migrating anyways, and now with this reminder that I’d be investing time and building expertise in a system that won’t necessarily be available (or at least not affordable) for future projects I’m wondering whether now might well be the time to jump ship. Textpattern seems the next logical choice, but again, it’s not a purely open source program, and thus subject to the same problems down the road (though its creator insists it’ll remain free for noncommercial use, I’m wary until I see the Creative Commons license in print) – plus, it’s not clear that the same development community will form around Textpattern, and plugins like mt-amazon or mt-blacklist are as vital to my use of Movable Type as the CMS itself. Meanwhile, there’s WordPress, which gets a thumbs-up for being open source but which is also still kind of clunky (particularly the fact that you can only run one blog off of a given installation).

In short, there doesn’t seem to be an ideal alternative, so I’ll probably stick with my current install of Movable Type for the moment (not like I’ve really got time to seriously go mucking around with porting to a new system anyways). I have no doubt that Mena, Ben and the rest of the people at Six Apart are good people, but it seems like my non-profit, academic interests might be diverging from theirs, which leaves me looking for another CMS to which to hitch my wagon.

Comments One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.

Alex,

May 15, 2004 at 10:53 pm

I agree with you. 6A can charge whatever they want, but this pricing scheme is not reasonable for many people, thus they will complain about it. I think they could charge and still make money, but I guess there was a conflict with Typepad. Also forcing people to register for Typekey when downloading the new MT shows that things really changed in 6A.

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