The Trotts, each of whom has a father who's a lawyer, did not release Movable Type as an open-source application under a license like the GPL, because "we had this fairness thing," Mena says -- they wanted to be compensated, or at the very least credited, for their work. But they decided to grant their users broad powers to access and extend the code that runs the system, in order to allow people to customize each copy of MT as much as possible. Users were barred from redistributing their changes to MT's code, but later versions of the system did allow them to create separate "plug-ins" to Movable Type, bits of code that could add functionality to MT and that could be distributed (for free or for sale) by third-party developers. This third-party plug-in development in MT is one of the major reasons for the system's success, Mena and Ben say. Without any input from Six Apart, bloggers and developers have created code that lets bloggers do some pretty cool things in MT -- adding your Netflix movie queue to your blog, say, or displaying the weather, or combating the scourge of comment spam.

This arrangement worked out well for the Web, and not so well for the Trotts. In a post that was widely circulated in the spring, Mark Pilgrim, a programmer and free-software devotee who runs a popular tech blog, wrote that with its hack-friendly architecture, Movable Type "hit a certain sweet spot" between free and not free, putting it "light years ahead of the competition." But of the many thousands of people using MT, few were willing to donate to support its continued growth; while MT blogs prospered, the Trotts were making an average of less than 40 cents for every copy of the software that people downloaded, which in the company's early days was enough to pay the bills, but nothing more.

"We were at this point where you're never going to lose any money, but you're not going to earn any either," Mena says. Considering all the third-party developers and the many people who work as full-time Movable Type consultants, "there's probably more people making a living on Movable Type outside of Six Apart than inside," Dash says.

The biggest problem, Ben and Mena say, were Web hosting services who were providing one copy of Movable Type to hundreds of users. "We were seeing installs with over 800 users on there, sometimes more," Ben says. So on May 13, with the release of the long-awaited version 3.0 of Movable Type, the company announced what it called an improved version of its licensing plan for Movable Type, one that asked different kinds of users of the system for different amounts of money. If you were building three or fewer Web sites and you weren't interested in tech support, you could use Movable Type for free. But if you wanted to run MT for any more authors or any more Web logs, you'd have to pay more -- as much as hundreds of dollars, even if you were using the system for only noncommercial purposes.

It'd be grave understatement to observe that this did not go over well. There were more than 800 TrackBacks -- responses on other blogs -- to Mena's post: "Ben and Mena Trott sucker punch the weblogging community"; "Six Apart shoots themselves in the foot"; "Movable Type, explosion en plein vol?"; "As of 4am PDT this morning, Movable Type sucks."

Mark Pilgrim's post was one of the most lucid. He'd been a longtime fan of MT, Pilgrim said, and few other weblogging tools could do as much as it could. But switching to the new version would cost him over $500, and he wasn't willing to spend that much, especially as there was a good-enough open-source alternative called WordPress, and that program would comport with his idea of "Freedom 0" -- the freedom to run an application "for any purpose." With Movable Type, he wrote, "I do not have the freedom to run the program for any purpose; I only have the limited set of freedoms that Six Apart chooses to bestow upon me, and every new version seems to bestow fewer and fewer freedoms. With Movable Type 2.6, I was allowed to run 11 sites. In 3.0, that right will cost me $535."

Six Apart was stung by the reaction, and surprised. The company had guessed that most MT users build relatively few sites for noncommercial purposes, and would not be adversely affected by the new licensing plan. This might in fact have been a correct assumption, but there were surely a lot of MT devotees who were upset about the new plan even if it wasn't going to hurt them personally. After all, this was Six Apart. This was Ben and Mena Trott, the couple whose mythic devotion to the blogosphere was widely praised. Why were they suddenly trying pocket some cash?

The company acted quickly to fix things. It made its licenses clearer and reduced some prices, allowing noncommercial users, for instance, to run as many MT sites as they want for $100. Dash says that MT sign-ups have increased since the new plan went into effect, and that the extra resources the company was able to devote to the product greatly improved it -- a new version, 3.1, is set to launch in a matter of weeks.

Still, many people left MT for other tools, especially WordPress, which many bloggers say is easier to install than MT and, despite lacking some features, offers some enhancements. The application, an open-source project that was spun off, or "forked," from an earlier weblogging tool called B2, is run by Matthew Mullenweg, a programmer who lives in Houston. Mullenweg, who emphasized that he has great respect and admiration for the Trotts and considers his rivalry with them to be exceedingly friendly, estimated the number of WordPress blogs at 15,000 -- a fraction of MT's user base, "but WordPress is only a year old," Mullenweg said. He said that in addition to Pilgrim, other high-profile bloggers had switched to WordPress, not only because it's open source but also because it handles comment spam in a more hassle-free manner, and because, unlike MT, it loads pages "dynamically," meaning that bloggers don't have to wait several minutes to "rebuild" their site after making a change.

One of the high-profile bloggers Mullenweg pointed to is Molly E. Holzschlag, a Web designer and an author of tech books who blogs at Molly.com. Holzschlag literally wrote the book on Movable Type: "Teach Yourself Movable Type in 24 Hours," coauthored with Porter Glendinning. But to Holzschlag's dismay, her book was released in the same week that Six Apart suddenly announced its new version and licensing plan. "I was really rather disappointed that despite a good relationship with Anil Dash and what I'd hoped would be a positive thing for MT itself, no one at Six Apart communicated these changes to us, which severely compromised our ability to make sure the book was as up-to-date as possible," Holzschlag wrote on her blog.

In an interview, Holzschlag said she harbored no ill-feeling toward Six Apart, and though she'd switched her own blog over to WordPress, she was still recommending Movable Type to her Web design clients. "I think Movable Type is a really good product for certain applications," she said. "I think they're moving towards enterprise-level software rather than the 'publishing for the people' concept they started with. They had presented themselves as publishing for the people, but when it came down to it they saw they had a profitable product and they made a natural switch."

If you ask Six Apart about this, they don't really deny it. Who is Movable Type for? Is it for publishing for the people? Not if the people don't know much about installing a server-based Perl application, Dash says. MT is not an easy program to install and to use, and it's not supposed to be easy. "It's always been for professionals and experts," he says. "As far as average bloggers go, you could say it's a 'pro-sumer' tool -- it's overkill for people that need overkill." For people who don't want overkill, there's TypePad, Six Apart says -- a flexible, beautiful blogging app for the masses.

Indeed, the main interest in Movable Type at the moment is from businesses looking to improve internal communication, Six Apart says. One example many MT devotees cited was at Disney's cable operation, where technical operators spread around the world, working different shifts, used MT to track what everyone had done at work that day -- messages like "I plugged in this cable," "I replaced that lens," "I fixed this bulb," Dash said. Originally, the company had been doing this tracking using paper and a fax machine. Then it purchased a proprietary database system, but that was difficult to maintain and hard to use. One day, one of the employees, a blogger in his spare time, suggested they switch to MT. "They didn't call it blogging, they just called it a Shiftlog, which is what they'd always called it," Dash says. But whatever they called it, it worked, greatly improving the efficiency of their operation.

"I think law offices are a great example of where this would work," Dash says. "Lawyers are used to accounting for their time, but they don't have a way to articulate what's been happening. You can say 'I met with this client,' but you can't say, 'This is a what he had to say, here's what I did in this Word document.'" Blogging fills that void, and because it's easy to use, people will use it.

"In the old days people would deploy Lotus Notes and Exchange to do these things, but nobody would use it -- everybody would just use e-mail," Dash says.

Everybody still uses e-mail, but e-mail has its own problems -- it's clogged, and you might send a note to people who don't want it, and forget to send it to people who do want it. With blogs "people who care about it can find it," says Dash. "And maybe they don't care about it for six months, but it just sits there until you find it. At Six Apart, we're growing so fast that new people coming in often wonder about our history. 'Why was this decision made?' I've seen new people come to us and go all the way back in our blog to September 2002. 'Oh, I see where the name TypePad came from.' That kind of thing has incredible value."

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