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Ok, so maybe I feel a little bit bad about contributing to the 335+ trackback entries on Mena’s post about MovableType’s new licensing and pricing scheme.
I can only wonder what’s going on in the minds of those people at SixApart. Will they bend to the user outcry, like reeds in the wind? Or are they resolute in their plan to make MovableType into a real living, desperate to keep their young corporation alive and support the employees they have hired? I really can’t blame them for wanting to make money. To be sure, that would be one of the first things on my mind if I started a corporation. SixApart is in a difficult position, however, having gone from a small group of developers working on a popular, free project, to a corporation trying to develop and support its several product offerings while making enough money to pay the bills and the employees.
Hopefully things will work out well for everybody on their end. I wouldn’t wish bankruptcy or layoffs on anyone, particularly those with families to support and particularly in a high-cost-of-living area such as the San Francisco Bay.
In the meantime, here at prwdot.org I already have a fully-functional WordPress installation up and running. It actually didn’t take too much work to get it up and running, and I am grateful to WP’s founding developer, Matt Mullenweg (who has a very nice site by the way) for personally responding to a couple of my emails in regards to some questions I had. From what I can see, it looks like a very nice product.
I haven’t decided whether or not I’m actually going to switch our blog over, however. For the moment, we don’t have any practical reason to switch. The current version of MovableType is working well for us, and MovableType in general has been working well on the sites that I’ve run since April 16, 2002 – over two years. I personally have put a lot of time and effort into learning the ins and outs of MT, and it seems like a shame to put that all to waste. I rarely make decisions based on idealism, and at this point, switching to WordPress simply because I don’t like the way MovableType is changing would clearly be an idealistic decision.
To quote Radiohead, “Pragmatism, not idealism.”