***Simon Cozens|http://simon-cozens.org/***, the extraordinary Perl guru, poet, photographer, and preacher, is starting work on his own next-generation blogging system: ***Feuilleton|http://wiki.simon-cozens.org/index.cgi?Feuilleton***. I’m very excited about this. Simon isn’t as immersed in the blogosphere as some of us are, but he has incredible design and programming talents, and all he needs is some input from the user community to come up with something really cool.

As a side note, Simon is just one of many technologists who I’ve discovered are also Christians. This list also includes:

* ***Larry Wall|http://www.wall.org/~larry/***, creator of Perl
* ***Rich Bowen|http://www.rcbowen.com/***, member of the Apache Software Foundation and active participant in the Apache Documentation Project.
* ***Brad Rhine|http://truetech.org/***, developer of the Frequency and Tangelo blogging tools.
* ***Chris Nandor|http://pudge.net/***, Mac+Perl developer, Slashdot moderator

Netcraft: Changes at MT, Blogger Highlight Blog Hosting Strategies

In the article linked above, internet research and analysis firm ***Netcraft|http://www.netcraft.com/*** offers their take on the Blogger and Movable Type news of the past few weeks. They offer an explanation for Six Apart’s licensing scheme as follows:

qqq|Six Apart’s pricing for MT 3.0 appears to have been influenced by two hosting-related concerns: steering MT users to the more profitable TypePad, and licensing MT for use by other hosting providers. The $69.95 price on the cheapest MT license costs more than a full year of TypePad hosting, which offers far more features.|qqq

In other words, they’re hoping that people who are using MT for more personal reasons will just use the cheaper TypePad instead, and that people who are running MT in commercial installations will start paying for it, since they are now allowed to charge for it.

Netcraft also correctly identifies the blogging community as “price-sensitive”. Like me, many users simply can’t or won’t pay for a blogging service, particularly if they are already paying for their web hosting space.

Which brings up an interesting point. I’m already paying $25.95 per month for my web hosting service. ***Site5|http://www.site5.com/*** could conceivably purchase some sort of Movable Type site license from Six Apart, and then enable all of their users to have access to it for a small monthly fee increase. If this were to happen, I certainly might consider paying the few extra bucks per month.

Apart from the Movable Type changes, of course, Netcraft discussed ***Blogger|http://www.blogger.com/***’s recent overhaul. For no particular reason, we have been managing our ***Scrabble This!|http://scrabble.prwdot.org/*** blog with Blogger. I have had a chance to check out the new Blogger site and features, and I have to say that I’m very impressed. Thanks to the power and financial wherewithal of ***Google|http://www.google.com/***, Blogger is able to offer a lot of advanced features for free. They have great XHTML compliant code, well-designed CSS and XHTML templates, built-in commenting and RSS feeds, and blogging-via-email to name a few features.

Blogger has really come a long way. I used Blogger to manage ***my old blog|http://peter.prwdot.org/?p=archives-individual*** from December 5, 2000 until April 15, 2002, and moved to Movable Type after that because it had more features and allowed me to have complete control over the blogging system from my own web host. I still like the control offered by running my own blogging system, but I have to admit that Blogger is now really a great service. I highly recommend it if you’re looking to start up your own blog.

Of course, I’d also be happy to host your blog on this server if you’re interested. I’m already hosting ***Pulcher Sentio|http://pulchersentio.prwdot.org/*** and ***waltondammerung|http://waltondammerunprwdot.org/g/***, so just drop me a line if you’d like to be set up as well!

SixApart has responded to the user community’s criticisms by slightly restructuring their licensing terms and pricing. Based upon the new scheme, if I were to upgrade our current installation to 3.0, I would need to purchase the Movable Type 3.0 Personal Edition for $69.95. This is less than the $119.95 I would have had to pay for the previous “Volume License I”, but still too much in my opinion.

Movable Type is in a competitive marketplace. There are numerous weblog tools, some of which are arguably close to MT in terms of features, and many of which are nearing it in popularity. They have one thing in common, though. The most popular weblog tools are free. By adding this new pricing scheme, I believe Six Apart has effectively priced Movable Type out of the competition. Sure, perhaps they’re now appealing to a different crowd, who relies on the quality and support (or at least the perceived quality and support) that a paid commercial product ensures. But I think they’ve lost touch with their core following – knowledgeable people who have set up their own MT installations for themselves and a few of their friends.

So as it stands now, I have no plans to upgrade to Movable Type 3.0. I certainly cannot move to the Free Edition, as our site has one too many blogs and three too many authors. Since I really am satisifed with the current 2.661 version, and don’t really have any reason to upgrade at all, I also won’t be paying for the Personal Edition.

I just hope that Six Apart will provide security patches for older versions, when and if they are necessary. That would be the least they could do to maintain some respect.

qqq||qqq

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.”

***Exposé is cool|http://prwdot.org/img/expose_stuff.jpg***.