Movable Type has updated to 3.0. This blog, as well as about a dozen other blogs I manage and host for friends runs Movable Type. Another dozen or so blogs I manage and host for friends runs WordPress. Following the new licensing restrictions of Movable Type, I regret to say that I will no longer be installing or updating any of the Movable Type blogs. Any future projects I will be doing involving blogs will be using WordPress or other open source software like it. Furthermore, I have donated $20 to WordPress and hope its developers continue to add features and further support for international and multi-lingual blogs. And if they don’t, being open source, anyone else can come along and add these features themselves. I encourage others to donate to them, especially those among my friends who I have installed the program for.
My views on the new Movable Type update are pretty much the same as those in Mark’s article on the subject. In case you haven’t heard, Movable Type, in its freely downloadable version, supports only one author and three blogs. Who knows what other restrictions will be introduced later. The cost for purchasing the program is well beyond what I can or am willing to pay.
I understand the reasons that Movable Type has decided to make this move and I think they knew they were taking a big gamble in balancing the loss of support amongst the “freedom or death” online community with the income and licensing fees they undoubtedly deserve for their hard work on the software. They are like any other economic venture which seeks a profit, and a return on a great deal of investment in time and labor. I don’t hold it against them. However, there are fortunately others who are investing their time and labor into projects that are free and open source (including my own humble creations) and as long as there are even imperfect alternatives with a similar feature set, I’m sorry—I will ditch commercial and restrictive licenses for the GPL or other open license any day.
Eventually I may move this blog to WordPress as well, but the older version of Movable Type is still working fine for me here and until I have issues that can’t be resolved without an update, I’ll continue to use it.
I really like WordPress, and I’ve had really good experiences dealing with their developers. But I’m worried about moving from MT to WP since I want to maintain continuity with my existing blog.
WP is great because it is all PHP, so there is no need for “rebuilding” ever – everything is changed instantly. And the new version (now in beta) supports ecto (except for image uploads).
But I would like to keep all the links to my old blog entries without breaking anything when I move over to WP. I know WP can import older entries, but the URLs would all change.
I see Mark was able to migrate from MT to WP without degrading his links. Not that I have the time to redo my sight just now. MT 3 is working fine for me, and it is still free enough for me.