What causes people to use Moveable Type as opposed to PostNuke, WordPress, Slashcode, Phorum, or any of a dozen other free CMS's out there? What makes it so special? I'm intrigued that they can charge serious money and not lose all their customers to the free stuff.

I obviously can't speak for everyone, but for me, it's mainly that MT was the first CMS I tried that fit my needs, and it ain't broke. I'm not saying it's perfect, but between the app itself and the community's involvement I've been able to work around whatever it lacks. From what I've seen of the gnu/os/whatever CMSs, this is generally the case, the base app could be better but the devs get into it and come up with the mods and plugins.

There are other CMSs I've been meaning to try for other projects, but when I get around to it, they'll be *new* projects. For what I've already got, I'm sticking with MT because at this point I know it like the back of my hand and the idea of having to trash all that knowledge and work -- start over with something new, re-convert everything that I've cobbled together with MT over the past two years, including a re-conversion of the stuff I've gradually switched over from plain HTML -- is unappealing at best.

I'd rather cough up the money or stick with an outdated version for most of it than put in all the time and effort that would be required to switch over to something else to get features I don't necessarily want or need when I don't have an issue with MT's functionality.

My beef with 6A is the personal licensing structure, and that's it. I wasn't paying them for my personal license to begin with, so if I end up not paying...well. It's money they weren't getting in the first place, so it probably won't be missed.