Movable Type 3.0 has been released under a new licence scheme, with some commentary and explanation from Mena about the move to charging for their software.
A lot of people are up in arms about it, but personally I think it’s A Good Thing™, and wish them all the best. Brad Choate sums up the changes and points out that it’s not such an evil move after all in an excellent summary and analysis of the changes.
People get too emotional about software, often feeling as if they “own” a physical thing, and more disturbingly feeling as if they have some sort of creative ownership, when never having lifted a finger to make it.
People need to eat, and they’ve created some fair licensing policies; what gets me is the sheer droves of “this sucks, I’m moving to xyz” posts popping up: who cares? I’m sure MT 2.xx will still be popular for some time to come, and MT 3.xx may not be as popular, but will have enough users to keep SA in business for a while, so why be so dramatic in moving to another system? It’s just software, nobody really cares as long as the information gets distributed.