My love affair with Movable Type was neither brief nor flirtatious, but it is definitely over.

Six Apart, the makers of MT, recently introduced a licensing scheme for MT 3.0 that has caused users like myself to opt out of using newer editions of the popular blogging engine.

I’m not bitter. Ben and Mena Trott deserve to charge as much as they want for their software. In fact, users and corporations who will choose to pay for the licensed features of MT 3.0 should feel that their money is well spent.

But I’m a hobbiest, a blogger and, above all, a tinkerer. The change in MT’s licensing is not a just money issue. Instead, I think Mark Pilgrim’s perspective on MT’s licensing scheme addresses the issue which prevents me from continuing to use newer versions of MT: freedom.

I’ve invested a fair amount of effort into jury-rigging and customizing MT’s propriety tags. I have three authours using my MT installation and, at last count, I have 15 blogs providing this personal site with one sort of functionality or another—Six Apart doesn’t have pricing scheme for my odd scenario.

Like I’ve said before, my MT installation does alot of things for me which can be attributed to me hacking away with plugins and code that implement features I want. Yet, it is Sixapart who decides not just how much MT 3.0’s licensing should be strutured, but what also which features deserve to be licensed in the first place. Considering the effort I invest in my site and looking at the situation long-term, I can’t adopt MT 3.0+ for the very reason that it is clear that I cannot control how the terms which govern my usage of MT may change. If MT’s licensing can or will contstrain my ability to freely experiment and shape my blogging projects now or in the future, then why would I commit to a blogging system that further railroads my efforts? I’m at a dead-end.

Licensing is a Feature

Perhaps this is where the GPL comes in. You see, the revelation that this MT 3.0 hoopla points to is the lesson that licensing is a powerful feature of a blogging platform. Blogs are things which users like myself look at with a wrench in our hands and with eye towards the long-term. Computing history has shown us that there are plenty of organizations who have found themselves forced to stick with expensive or inadequate software because they’ve already expended great resources on structuring their operations around that computing platform. Why should bloggers feel any compulsion to follow suit? Open-source software is a viable option. As Pilgrim suggests, wouldn’t technically-savvy bloggers be compelled to invest their time on content systems that will always be open to some sort of on-going collaborative development, such as a code fork? Movable Type has a wonderful and devoted developer community. I have great faith in the ability of tts members or like-minded individuals to craft a project which will offer rich features and an open license to its users.

Migration Beckons

MT 2.65 is a fabulous content engine. In fact, I’m not migrating away from MT immediately. I and my users have most of the features we could ask for in this weaker-licensed version of MT. At some point though, some innovation or growing need will rear its head and I’ll have to transition this entire site over to a different content management system to access new features. I may even be forced to rely on several different systems which I will have to home-brew to integrate. I can’t tell yet exactly how I’m going to have do it.

Many existing MT sites, such as dive into mark and Scriptygoddess have adopted Word Press. It looks like a promising platform, and seems to be an engine I would choose atleast at this moment. But I have some time yet to make a decision and I will wait to see how the developer community deals with MT’s licensing shift. Perhaps many plugin authours will continue to extend the feature set of MT 2.6x, in which case I may continue to tinker with my current setup for a long time to come. Then again, Word Press, or some other application, may swell with rechanneled development and provide a clearcut answer for a premier open-sourced blogging engine. Either way, my future choice for a blogging platform will, unfortunately, no longer be Movable Type.