Movable Type 3.3, now completely free
from AntBlog701

Movable Type 3.3, now completely free

Six Apart released Movable Type 3.3 a few days ago, and is now completely free for personal use. Six Apart decided to make their personal license for Movable Type even more open: The personal version of Movable Type is now completely free, and supports as many blogs and authors as you want. Of course, they continue to offer paid support as an option for personal blogs, along with services such as professional installation. Excellent move!

New features of Movable Type 3.3 including:

• tags
• Widgets
• Activity Feeds
• New Blog Styles
• Powerful Templating Language

Tags: Describe your entries with tags so readers can easily find any content and subscribe to custom feeds.
Widgets: Arrange and manage your page just by dragging and dropping. Widgets can include your own content or content from other web services and feeds.
Activity Feeds: Reduce the burden of managing your blog by getting all the updates on comments and feedback on your blog, along with your blog's activity, delivered via a secure custom feed.
New Blog Styles: Customize the look of your site with just a few clicks, without editing any HTML. Choose from dozens of unique designs and layouts.
Powerful Templating Language: Movable Type's industry-leading template language is more powerful than ever, letting you choose exactly which content you want to display on your pages, as well as how it's presented. Customize your entire site without having to do any programming.

When Six Apart started offering professional support and paid licenses for Movable Type over two years ago, it was heavily criticised for not being open and license fees, mainly from open-source extremists. Most of them switched to WordPress for the main reason WordPress is free. (Mark Pilgrim's article provides some popular reasons why many people dumping Movable Type.) I would like to point out, when Six Apart changed its license model, there has always a free version for personal use. But thanks to the success of propagation by those open-source extremists, many people mistakenly believe Movable Type does not have free versions.

To me, it's fair that the free version does not have professional support, community support forum is still available. What's more ironic is that the creator of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, conducted a very unethical behaviour, and surprisingly many open-source extremists simply chose not to comment on his condemnable behaviours. Matt Mullenweg used WordPress’ popular site and high Google PageRank (10/10) to harbour spamming articles, commonly known as “Cloaking”. For more detail on this issue, please refer to this blog entry.

As for me, I bought an unlimited license for Movable Type. I am very happy with this blogging software, it worths money I paid for. It is good that this software is now completely free and hoping more bloggers will use Movable Type.

Link:
Movable Type 3.3 Features
Six Apart Releases Movable Type Enterprise and Movable Type 3.3 (Six Apart Press Release)

Related entries:
from Pico to nano; from Image::Magick to Crypt::DSA (6 June, 2006)
Movable Type 3.2 installed... success (30 August, 2005)
I bought MovableType (30 July, 2005)
spamming by the creator of popular WordPress (3 April, 2005)