This is the kind of thing that always happens when I go away for a few days; this time I came back to find a storm of web traffic discussing the long-awaited release of Movable Type 3.0. As I switched to WordPress last month, I can sit back and read the war of words without worrying about whether I should upgrade or not. An article by Mena (one of the developers), has received — at the time of writing this — 661 trackbacks. I scanned the list and I think it would be safe to say that the majority of respondents are not happy bunnies.

Indeed, the initial announcement produced so much bad press that they have now modified the pricing structure. My own opinion is that they have every right to make a living from all the hard work they have put in, but that it has been very clumsily done. Many people thought that previous announcements strongly suggested that MT 3.0 would be free. There is indeed a free version, but while it isn't physically crippled in any way, the licence prevents you from having more than one author on the blog or more than 3 websites. My guess is that as MT has traditionally been software for 'Power Bloggers', this would prevent most users from benefiting from the free version. Add that to the fact that there don't seem to be any significant new features in the new version, and — more seriously — that there are a number of fairly major bugs, and you can see why people are getting so exercised about it.

If you want a balanced view of the debate, Brad Choate offers a well-considered pro- viewpoint, while Mark Pilgrim gives an equally fair counterpoint.