Sixapart is once again Announcing Pricing & Licensing Changes to Movable Type. Go figure. I don’t see a huge difference, myself. With a paid license, you no longer have any limits on number of weblogs created, but there are author limits. With the free version, you’re still limited to *one* author, which seems silly for many people.
I only have one person authoring anything on my site, but that depends on your definition of site. I host “Lysa”:http://lysa.andysocial.com as well, so does she count as another author and weblog? Or, would she count as a separate installation? It’s kind of irrelevent to me now, since I’ve moved to the Open Source “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org for my weblog.
My biggest heartache with the pricing scheme they have at Sixapart is this: one piece of software costs different amounts for different people. It’s the same bundle of code, yet if it’s used by one person it’s free, by two people it’s 70 bucks, and by six people it’s a hundred bucks. Why?
Again I look at other software and think, “huh?” If I buy Adobe Photoshop, it costs the same for me to use it or for me and five other people to use it, on a single installation. It’s the number of installations that matter, not the number of users.
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Again I look at other software and think, “huh?†If I buy Adobe Photoshop, it costs the same for me to use it or for me and five other people to use it, on a single installation. It’s the number of installations that matter, not the number of users.
Actually, if you read the Photoshop license, that’s not the case. If you have six people using Photoshop, Adobe expects you to purchase six licenses as well. That’s fairly common with commercial software, I believe.
Not if they’re all using the same machine.
bq. 2.1. General Use. You may install and Use a copy of the Software on your compatible Computer, up to the Permitted Number of Computers.
And so on. It doesn’t mention in the Adobe EULA(End User License Agreement) any number of users, unless it’s being installed on a server. When installed on a standalone workstation, not client-server, the number of *users* is irrelevant to Adobe, and the number of *installations* is what matters.
So the next obvious thing is to say that MT is inherently client-server and should be thought of in the terms of concurrent users instead of installations. It’s a nice idea, but considering that a full-featured CMS(Content Management System) such as “PostNuke”:http://www.postnuke.com/ is free, charging a hundred bucks for a blogging tool seems unlikely to support a company for long. Just my personal view.
Not saying that MT is not a fine piece of software, but the inflexibility of one author for free kind of makes it less than compelling for me. If the features of Open Source alternatives were not as good as they are, I’d stick with MT. Since I can find all the features I used and more in other formats, I’ll not be a hypocrite and continue using software for free when I’m not allowed. So, now the site has one author, Lysa. I know, I’m still allowed as long as I don’t upgrade, but I expect to upgrade the installation to keep up with the Comment Spam deluge and other such things, so I’ll follow the letter of the upcoming EULA.
Postnuke is a pretty shitty cms. 🙂
Postnuke may not be your idea of a great CMS (I’ve never used it, so I don’t know), but there are certainly a lot of sites using it so it must be worthwhile.