MT 3.0 License Update

Should I stay or should I go? Six Apart updated and clarified the license for Movable Type 3.0. The most important update for me was the removal of the single CPU limit. It appears that they accidentally forgot to delete that restriction when they copied the text from someone else’s software license. The most important clarification regarded what constituted a weblog (for further clarity, let’s use small ‘w’ weblog to indicate a weblog created within the MT admin tool and a large ‘W’ Weblog to indicate a logical website level Weblog). In the new license, the limit applies to Weblogs, not weblogs. This allows me to claim only a single Weblog, since my second weblog was just a test blog that appeared under the same https://www.wombatnation.com/ URL.

The author limits still stand, but my personal issue with them is admittedly an unusual one. When I was beta testing the newMediaObject XML-RPC call for Ben, I created a bunch of units tests with Python and PyUnit. In order to test whether MT’s implementation of newMediaObject was properly obeying security restrictions, I created a couple extra authors with different security permissions. Since I’m long finished with the beta testing for them, obviously I could go back and delete the authors I created, or take advantage of the license change that qualifies them as inactive accounts. The only problem for me would be if I wanted to do any more testing for them in the future that required testing security permissions.

So, the remaining issues for me are:

• Still annoyed about the unexpected changes, though I’m sure I’ll get over that soon
• Still seems too expensive for the value it provides to me

In the short term I will stick with MT and will likely upgrade to 2.661. However, I definitely plan to take a closer look at WordPress, Blosxom, and PyBlosxom. That will be a fun investigation, even if I later decide that the switching costs are too high.

WordPress – Visually the most attractive of the three. Seems the closest to MT in feature set. Written in PHP, which I know about as well as Perl, which I know as well as Dutch, which I don’t know that well. Like MT, it would be a tool I mostly use, but don’t hack on.

Blosxom – Like MT, written in Perl. Like MT and WordPress, it would be a tool I mostly use, but don’t hack on. Blosxom’s simplicity is very appealing for my personal blog, though I would more likely lean towards WordPress for a company blog.

PyBlosxom – Written in Python, which I do know better than Dutch. Most appealing if I decide I want to allocate some of my code hacking time to the blog tool that I use. To paraphrase what Ted Leung posted, there’s a lot of value in becoming an active member of the communities that also develop and use your favorite tools. If a strong community doesn’t develop, a tool may wither away and you will suffer switching costs again. PyBlosxom has a much smaller community than the other tools, but it benefits somewhat from the Blosxom community.