There’s been a lot of talk about Movable Type’s new licensing terms and whether or not they do a disservice to MT’s userbase. Since my post last week, Brad Choate, Jay Allen, and the admirable Kottke have all weighed in, clearing some of the fug with their sense and wisdom, DiveintoMark jumped ship, and Six Apart have asked us MT users how we use their program. Here I go, then:

I have two public, non-commercial blogs with two active authors on each. (My girlfriend is an active but infrequent author on all my blogs so she can clean up after me if I leave some messy code behind when I go away for the weekend*.) This blog is all text and pictures but my other blog is all video, delivering ~3-5 MB of lo-fi video per post. I have three private blogs for notes, work-related notes, and love notes. (Again: two active authors, one not very active except on the last one.) I’ve built two other non-commercial websites (Neutrino and BretPittman.com) with MT: the former might eventually reach 9 authors (only two now) and the latter has two authors. I can see myself possibly adding several blogs to my site in the future.

Regarding the pricing, I don’t think it’s all that expensive** but I agree with Jason Kottke when he says:

Why not make the personal edition a flat fee of ~$60 for unlimited users and weblogs (in addition to the free version with 1 author/3 weblogs)? Here’s the reasoning. Tiered personal use (per above) doesn’t make much sense. Trust that people using the personal edition will use it in a personal way. The guy offering 50 of his friends MT weblogs on subdomains isn’t going to pay for MT, not what you want him to pay anyway. If people start using it in that way, suggest an upgrade to the non-personal edition might be appropriate. If they refuse, they weren’t going to pay you anyway. #

Kottke elaborates further, following Six Apart’s clarification:

Someone hosting 50 people should pay more, but that should be handled as a non-personal situation on a case-by-case basis. What I feel is happening instead is that 6A is offloading a business problem of theirs that concerns only a small portion of their user base (i.e. the folks hosting 50 friends on one install) to all of their customers. Because of a few potential offenders, customers have to deal with pricing tiers, definitions of weblogs and users, keeping track of how many active weblogs and users they have, upgrading their licenses when they add authors or weblogs, etc. We shouldn’t have to do that. I don’t want to get out my credit card every time I want to add a guest author to my weblog. Do I get a refund if I purchase a 13 weblog/13 author license but 10 of those authors and 7 of those weblogs are inactive after 90 days? #

* And so she can post pictures of monkeys in my notes blog when I’m not paying enough attention to her or she misses me.