But what about meeeeee?

1. I am trying to wrap my head around the idea that Anil Dash is not just reading every single one of the thousand-plus trackbacks to the MT3D release-related posts on 6A, but doing it on the weekend.

2. "And you can create as many posts/documents as you want on any blog, which might be a better analogy to documents in Photoshop. However, you can have 5 people use the lowest-end license of Movable Type, and there's no version of Photoshop that lets 5 people use it, to extend the analogy."

Photoshop doesn't offer a free license at all ;P but if you pay for five Photoshop licenses, five people can use it.

MT3's lowest-end personal license is one user, not five, and doesn't cost anything; in effect, when you move up to a paid license, you are paying for additional user licenses, as well as technical support and additional blogs.

I'm still arguing that that my analogy's better as is: the MT3 cost structure is out of line with software standards in that it levies aditional fees based on usage on a per-user level even after the application is paid for.

Commercial products more similar than Photoshop to MT in their purpose and scope -- the WYSIWYGs and CMSs that streamline web publishing -- don't do this (I'm sure you can find exceptions somewhere, but wading through the MS, Adobe, Oracle, and Macromedia licenses has worn me out); once you've paid for your license, that's it. You can create as many documents, posts, blogs, sites, or whatever you want to call them, as you like, and don't incur additional fees unless you're extending those capabilities to additional users.

Even MT's sister, TypePad, offers the unfettered Pro account, where you're limited on the hosting side -- the disk space and bandwidth -- but not by what you may do with it, the number of blogs you can create. (I realize it's an imperfect comparison since they're somewhat different products, TP Pro also gives you unlimited authors, and you pay monthly for TP, but I think it holds nonetheless; once you've made your payment, you are unrestricted in what you can do with the application.)

I'd really like to know the reasoning behind this deviation.

If the idea is that having cost-based blog restrictions will prevent people from cheating the system and making a buck without giving back, the license states perfectly clearly that that's a no-no. The people going that route are the same scurrilous rapscallions who are breaking their 2.x licenses by offering paid hosting, installations, etc., without paying for a commercial license, and still won't pay, no matter how strongly you word your terms, as long as the only thing stopping them is an honor code.

Personally, I would love the option of paying a flat fee for a one-user, non-commercial, completely unsupported account with no limit on the number of blogs. An option for the multi-user, non-commercial single blog would be a nice touch. I'm guessing several members of the elite other-15% crew might agree.

3. "We have substantial non-profit discounts available, just contact us."
Why isn't this anywhere besides buried in the FAQs? Why not slightly alter the wording on the Get MT page to something like, "Accredited educational and 501c3 institutions that make use of Movable Type are eligible for our discounted licensing program"?

(4. I'd like to take a final, brief moment to point out that Adobe and many offer software companies offer licensing structures geared toward both small businesses and big, bad corporations. Thank you. The end.)

Posted by gwen at May 16, 2004 03:56 PM | TrackBack