Sixapart Revamps Movable Type Again - Simplifying Licenses At Last!
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While everyone was expecting the release of Movable Type 4.2 to be announced, Anil made an announcement that brought a lot more.
SixApart are not only releasing MT 4.2, but a new product - Movable Type Pro.
What exactly is MT Pro?
Anil's description was pretty clear, so I'll just quote him instead of trying to paraphrase:
MT Pro includes all of the Community Solution features, all of the Professional Pack features, and all the core platform improvements in MT 4.2.
While that sounds nice and quite interesting it's not going to get that many people excited.
The next bit of the announcement, however, is going to make things very interesting and exciting (at least for those of us who appreciate MT for what it is - a really nice platform):
You told us you love the Community Solution features, but they were tooOne of the biggest areas of confusion had been the licensing options. Even with the introduction of the Open Source product it was still very hard to see exactly what was what, but with the new licensing model you don't pay unless you want support from 6Apart and the cost of that support should not be abhorrently expensive.
expensive or too hard to get. Now, there's just one version that has
everything. (Enterprise is still a separate solution on top of that, but we
figured that's okay for the enterprise audience.)
Licensing and pricing used to be hard to explain. Now it's easy: MT Pro is
free for bloggers. MT Pro is a free upgrade for anyone with an MT4 license.
And MT Pro's new simplified licensing starts at just a couple of hundred
bucks for a commercial license with full support. (my emphasis)
From my own perspective I see this as a great news since it will mean that more people are likely to at least play around with Movable Type once they know that they won't be dealing with complex or expensive licensing unless they need the technical support.
There are a few projects that I'd love to see adopt MovableType going forward and with this change this may actually become a reality.
In any case the 4.2 release is going to bring quite a few improvements to MT overall, both in terms of functionality, ease of use and even security.
I've been testing the beta releases a bit in my spare time and they definitely have made significant improvements at all stages, including the install process.
Well done to Byrne, Anil, Chris and the rest of the team!
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