The commercial aspect of MT is one facet of my criticism vis a vis my own personal use of course. Perhaps more importantly, I have the impression, call it a feeling, that the vibrant community of MT users and developers has moved on from there. This isn’t to say that a core of influential and important, creative and intelligent users doesn’t remain, nor is it to say that I don’t have confidence in Six Apart’s ability to continue to meet the needs of bloggers with your product offerings, including the limited no-cost release of MT. I do acknowledge that the community exists, and Six Apart does have my confidence.

But if I am going to dive into the deep end of the pool of self maintenance of my blogging platform – a new thing for me – then I want there to be others around who will be supportive of my self-education. The best bloggers that I know on MT are no more technical than I am. The technical bloggers I know are dancing around the Textpattern/Wordpress/ and to some extent the Drupal world(s). The amazing array of adequate Content Management Systems gives me a big choice. As I educate myself to make the choice, I remain stuck with the impression of MT and Six Apart as a solid commercial product offered by a good company.

Wordpress and Drupal are perhaps less solid and founded in a community of users and developers rather than built on a corporate interest. Therefore, for me, eliminating MT from my menu has more to do with the possibility of conversations in the GPL communities and less to do with the technical merit of the Movable Type product.

MT remains a viable alternative for me to recommend to clients and I think you people will continue to grow and prosper in the market.

If you’d like to hear about some of the inconsistencies I ran into in the information and access to MT on the Six Apart web site we could yak about that offline.

Thanks for asking.