Jason Kottke <a href="http://www.kottke.org/04/05/the-end-of-free">puts into words</a> better than I can what my issues with the MT3 licensing terms are...



Simply put I can't even bring my site as-is into compliance with the most expensive personal license, and that makes me very sad. I guess it's time to explore other options.

I'm very impressed that so many people have multiple weblogs with multiple authors. Jason makes a good point about how "guest" bloggers (who are not regular users but need an account to post to someone's site) count as permanent authors and that doesn't jive with the intent of the tiered pricing scheme. I also understand that some people like the software so much they run a bunch of different personal projects using it, but an argument could be made that the tiered pricing ought to kick in under those circumstances, and it's just that it's too much money for many people. (If I were running 10 personal blogs, I wouldn't want to pay more than $100, and would gladly use free software that does the same basic thing instead.)



I'm obviously from the one-user-one-blog camp, and my first reaction was that I was willing to pay $70 and was pleased to see that I still didn't have to. If I really rebuild my site with the free version of MT the way I have in mind and like it well enough, I'll probably buy it.

Ah, their download page clarifies the temporary author question:



"Author counts are based on "active" authors, those that have logged in within the last 90 days"



And:



"Weblog counts are based on "active" weblogs, those that have had posts created within the last 90 days"



"One site at one URL counts as a weblog for your license, even if it is made up of more than one weblog in the software"



... though the last point seems to contradict the definition of "weblog" in the license text...

Yeah, that's new. It does bring ne(one)piphany back into compliance, but I'll have to axe my group blog -- those are still not tenable under the licensing.