Roll Your Own

From Shelley: Personal Edition of MT3.0 is a staggering “$70 (reduced from $100)”:http://secure.sixapart.com/

I can understand why they want to charge for use, but that does seem a little excessive, doesn’t it? Don’t they know who the users of MT are?

Yes, there is a free version, but it is crippleware. 1 author and 3 weblogs; I have 4 weblogs setup to run this site + other abandoned weblogs. What happens when you start a new weblog and close one of the others, do you have do delete of one the three.

I tried to download MT3.0 free edition, but got hit with a “You must be registered with TypeKey” message. Why? And when I went to register (I don’t want to be one of those people Mark is going on about) I got redirected to this URL — http://www.faketypepad.com:9120/t/typekey/register which gave a 502 - Bad Gateway.

faketypepad? I’m not registering there, mate.

There is a difference between a hosted service and an installed product, but who is going to pay that much for a product when there are free alternatives?

Me, I’m going to roll my own, or go with pyBloxsum (me no can do perl or php). I’d never pay for a product of this nature (I would pay for Typepad if I needed to have a hosted blog). The incentive is that “bloglines”:www.bloglines.com will surely go for the payment route eventually and I will want to have a personalised version of my own before then.

+UPDATE: After reading more about this, I’d like to clarify some further thoughts.+

+It appears the licensing is on an honour system, so it isn’t technically crippleware, but you’ll probably get cease and desist emails instead. It isn’t Free Software, but then neither was MT2.x. Given my recent preference for free software (you can blame Lugradio for this), I would turn away from MT anyway.+

+I can hardly have a go at the pricing anyway, considering “who I work for”:http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/0327oracle.html. It looks like MT doesn’t want to be seen as blog software, but CMS software and wants to overcharge the same way other commercial CMS software do.+

+The 1 author, 3 weblog rule for the free version wouldn’t be so bad if there were new features that meant that all the extra little sidebar blogs would be unneccessary to run it (hierarchical categories for example). I have read that there are few new features of this type and the backend has been rewritten.+

+One final thought, will developers for this “platform” be expected to charge for their new plugins?+

8 Responses to “Roll Your Own”

  1. Shelley Says:

    I didn’t know about the forced TypeKey thing.

    Boggles.

    Absolutely boggles.

    I’m a PHP fan, though, so will continue the Wordpress/Textpattern route. But pyBloxsum is a good alternative, too.

  2. Mark Paschal Says:

    Thanks for catching our bug with the hard-coded development server link.

  3. Anonymous Says:

    Lunatics Anonymous » MT Ain’t Free No More
    [Pingback]

  4. sil Says:

    I’ll cast my vote, probably, in favour of pyblosxom. I had to hack the hell out of it to get it to do what I want, though. I mean, I’m OK with heavily hacking a Python thing, but I’m abnormal in this…

  5. gilmae Says:

    Go on, roll your own…you know you wanna. And then when you get something that is barely usable done, you can procrastinate for the next 30 months over "fixing it"

  6. Long story; short pier Says:

    MT 3.0.
    Oh, hey, guess I’m sticking with MovableType 2.661 for a bit. —It’s not that I begrudge them their lucre and it’s not that I think software must (necessarily) be free or something like that; it’s just that I’m a…

  7. sparkes Says:

    That’s the first time I have been held responsible for something and not quickly blurted out “it wasn’t me!” shaggy stylee ;-)

  8. Alex Says:

    pyblosxom the best (python clear OBJ language)! Wordpress/Textpattern if you like PHP