Funny the difference a day or so can make — and never let it be said that people (or corporations) can’t learn from their mistakes. Six Apart has posted updates and clarifications to their licensing options that make things look much more reasonable.

Briefly, the key points that I was concerned about…

The single-CPU limitation nonsense:

The single CPU usage statement was not intended to be in the license. It has been struck from the license, and everyone who has downloaded Movable Type 3.0 thus far can officially consider this change retroactive.

Admittedly, I’m very curious about this one. If it wasn’t intended to be in the license, how did it get in there in the first place? And then stay there up to the point where it was posted to the website? Didn’t anyone (their lawyers, for example) go over this stuff with a fine-toothed comb first? This is the sole point that still really has my eyebrows raised.

The number of weblogs or authors in an installation:

Firstly, they’ve changed a few of the licensing options a tad, and added the ability to purchase “add-on” weblogs to a license for ten dollars (for instance, if your license specified five weblogs, you can buy the rights to run a sixth).

Secondly, and far more importantly, they’ve clarified what is considered a single weblog — essentially, the wording might be better if it was called a website rather than a weblog.

The question of what a “weblog” is is somewhat muddy, but the basic answer to the first question is that, if you’re using multiple “Weblogs” in Movable Type in order to build 1 site, that only counts as 1 weblog towards the license limits.

In our licenses, we now address this with this language: “Weblog” means a single Web site viewable at a single URL (Uniform Resource Locator), consisting of one or more weblogs as generated by the Software via the “Create New Weblog” function of the Software. To be clear, sub-weblogs that make up weblog sites shouldn’t be counted toward your weblog total.

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p>This is excellent to hear, and should alleviate the concerns of many (if not most) of the people who, like me, found the licensing scheme overly restrictive.

That said, I’m still curious about some of the other options out there, and will continue to investigate them, but at least I don’t feel nearly as concerned about potentially moving my personal webserver to MT 3 at some later date if I decide to take that path.

[See also: Two Dave Winer grumbles | Why I won’t be upgrading to MT 3.0 | MovableType 3.0: Ouch | I hate it when I’m stupid | Protect the Baby Squirrels ]

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