May 15, 2004

I live under a large, soundproof rock — that’s how I managed to completely miss the uproar over the new Movable Type licensing scheme until today. Since Thursday morning thousands of virulent, murderous blog entries have been posted, most of them in haste and anger. The hate is lovely to see.

Movable Type was once distributed for free, but to upgrade to the newest version hardcore bloggers will have to shell out hundreds of dollars. The changes in the licensing system have been so profound that many bloggers are contemplating abandoning Movable Type altogether and those not too busy whining have already done so.

I dislike the new draconic licensing, but I’m so comfortable living under my large rock that I can’t be bothered to move to a different blogging system right now. I first installed Movable Type when I redesigned PhysComp.org — I wanted to turn the site into a community blog and MT was attractive because it was free, robust, and allowed an unlimited number of authors.

I loved MT once I got used to it: the unlimited number of blogs was a real turn on as was the relatively uncomplicated templating system. Because I’m on a server that’s rather stingy with the MySQL databases, I was glad that MT used Berkley databases instead. When spam became an issue, plugins were easily available to address the problem. Thus, MT has been good to me, despite some drawbacks like the inefficient page rebuilds and ghastly Perl code.

That’s why I’m sticking with the current version of MT for now — everything works happily. But over the next few weeks I want to get my blog ready for a possible move to a different blogging system. I can’t afford the newest MT since I’m living under a rock and everything.