Hmmm, we’ve been down this road before, have we not?
I never fully drank the Movable Type Kool-Aid, and as I’ve said before, it’s an extremely well done application, from the UI to the code, I don’t have any real issues. My problem is with the license. Which people describe as vague, and rightly so. At one point in time I created templates to match this site, tested importing data, and had things tweaked just so. Still, something kept me from pulling the trigger, and it was the license. It worried me. (Then again, I’ve been called a “license weenie.”) Oh, it’s not that Movable Type wasn’t under an open-source license, it was that the license had some strange restrictions. Like the whole, “you can’t charge someone to install/support it” thing. It made sense at the time, Six Apart was just looking out for themselves, wanting to make the money (if there was any) on support services. I don’t blame them at all for that, but it did conflict with my needs.
I work with software, and I do support for software, and often I get paid for this. I invest my time and money in learning how things work and charge others for my knowledge and support. This can’t be done with Movable Type. That’s ok, there’s other software that it can be done with, and I end up using that. Still, when I look at how powerful and just plain nice Movable Type is, I think it’s a shame I can’t add it to my list.
(Oh, before you sign up for that new Google’s AdSense service, you should make sure you have a commercial license for Movable Type. Or you should ask Six Apart. Or… hmmm, it’s not really clear what you should do…)
I’ll end this by saying that I wish the best for Six Apart, the Trotts, and Movable Type. I really wouldn’t say this much about it if I thought it was crap. I think it’s good, and I want to see good come out of it. That’s it…
(See what other have to say about this.)
One more thing: Six Apart is listening, and reacting – good for them.