As you may have heard, the folks who make MoveableType have recently announced a new licensing structure which turns what was once a nice little free blogging system into something that better resembles greedware.

Here’s the thing, I’m OK with Ben and Mena (Six Apart’s founders) making money off of their creation. I use an older version of MT on this site and I’m still amazed at what I’m able to accomplish in it. It’s a truly wonderful little program and they deserve their kudos. This site alone would still be able to use the free version of MT (which limits me to one author and three sites) but if I wanted Danielle to be able to add her two cents here, the price would immediately ratchet up to $99. For a personal website on which I make absolutely no money, that’s just not worth it.

So, let’s assume I find a way to make money off this site. For all intents and purposes, it immediately becomes a commercial venture. That ratchets the price of MT 3.0 way up to $199. If I’m making just enough money to cover my hosting fees, that’s just not worth it.

Now, to be fair to the Six Apart gang, they have indicated that they will enforce these licenses at their discretion. But, frankly, I’m not comfortable playing the “definition of what is ‘personal’” game with them. And, in the end, I’m really just a tightwad. I want my free software to be truly and actually free.

I could go on a major riff about “free meaning free” and the benefits of open source versus commercial software, but Someone else has already done it, and better than I could. Bottom line: I either need to stick with an old version of MT that has far fewer restrictions but no more support, or I need to find an alternative.

Here at the RobZazueta Labs, we’ve been busy cranking out a couple of projects that have been on our plates for months. They should be done VERY soon, which will make room for the next big thing: Yet Another RobZazueta.com Redesign (Codename: YARZR). My goals with YARZR are as follows:

1. Put the blog back on the front. I had envisioned writing a tech column once a week and promoting it up front. That didn’t happen. Will it happen someday? God, I hope so. But for now I’m going to try to focus on just being better at updating the blog.
2. Do something with the color scheme. My wife has complained that the color scheme on the blog is ugly and hard to read. My best friend likes the blog colors, but thinks the professional front-end is too bright and hurts the ol’ eyes. Me? I’m sort of sick of blue.
3. Add some more fun, experimental features that may draw more visitors and generate a little buzz. I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve yet.

Now to that list I’m going to have to add “Transition to new, GPLed blog service” whether it’s one of the ones out there now or one I build myself. And, before you inundate me with recommendations, Pivot is too confusing, WordPress is too limiting, PHPNuke isn’t GPL (unless I missed something) and none of them seem to allow for building a static filesystem through their interface.

One of the things that really sets MT apart for me is that I can use it to build pages and sub-pages - practically an entire site - all from within its interface. A weblog can represent a real weblog, a portal, a section of a site or whatever I want. MT is extremely flexible if you know what you’re doing. As popular as the MVC pattern is, I don’t want the overhead and messy maintenance of a single page controlling my entire site pulling data from the database. Let MySQL store the data that generates the pages, let Apache serve static pages and let PHP fill in the blanks. To me it just makes sense.

So, if you know of a system that does this, you let me know. And if I don’t find one by the time YARZR is ready for my plate, I promise to GPL whatever CMS I end up creating. I actually already have the guts of one written, I’d just need to flesh it out a bit more. Actually, a LOT more.