The Problems With MT 3.0

Just as a record, here are the current problem with the MT 3.0 license for the free version…

• Anyone who runs on a server with more than one CPU must purchase MT3. This immediately makes it impossible for many uses to use MT without paying the license fee.
• Anyone who uses multiple blogs for various purposes, even if they’re only for functionality must purchase MT3 at a considerable price.
• Having "open-mike night" type events violate the terms of the license agreements.
• Guest posters would violate the license agreement.

Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Six Apart could have saved them a major PR storm if they’d put a little more thought into the licensing of their product. The original concept of a free version of MT with the current features of MT 3.0 and an MT Pro with additional features/support for corporate/power users would have been a better model – they would have gotten more money in the end than trying to raise the price on the low end. Alternately, had the new version of MT added features that would negate the need to use multiple blogs for certain common tasks, the impact of this change would have been reduced.

I were Jay Reding.com, Inc. and were using MT as a full-fledged content management system, this license wouldn’t be too bad. However, what Six Apart has done is alienated their core user base – the ones who would have easily kicked in a few bucks for a great product had they not made the licensing so untenable for personal users. As it stands, anyone who does guest posts, has a number of authors, uses multiple blogs, or has a host that uses dual-CPU machines are shut out of using MT3 without paying a license fee that is simply too much for most of their market.

UPDATE: Heal Your Church Website has a perfect pricing plan for MT 3.0. In fact, if Six Apart adopted that price point plan, I’d buy an MT 3.0 upgrade today. That price point/feature point would match that of pMachine, keep the hobbyist market from moving to WordPress, and make Six Apart more money than the current price scheme.

So, what will it be? Do you want to sell 10,000 units at $99 or 100,000 at $30? If I were at Six Apart, I’d be seriously considering changing the licensing agreements to make sure that the company didn’t undo all the excellent work they’ve done so far.