MT has been promoted as a free, full-featured weblogging tool since day one; the only exception I recall was commercial use. More recently, Six Apart began talking about Movable Type Pro, and gave the impression that this would be a non-free upgrade for users whose needs exceed the features provided by the current Movable Type system. I had donated to Six Apart before, I've helped with Typepad beta testing and MT3 alpha testing, and was in fact planning to purchase Movable Type Pro simply as a display of gratitude. I'm sure other MT users felt similarly. The problem with the new pricing scheme isn't that people aren't willing to pay (though the prices are unreasonable for most users) -- it's that it runs counter to all of the expectations that Six Apart had built, and people don't know whether to trust Six Apart anymore; users had been led to believe that MT, with its existing feature set, would always be free of charge. Now this feels like a bait-and-switch. I have a friend who runs a family site that he had upgraded to MT3 while testing the beta; he's now looking at a $600 price tag.

Note that users of Wordpress, which is licensed under the GPL, will never face this issue.

On a separate note, the MT personal use license is absurd. It limits MT's use to a single computer on a single-processor system, which effectively precludes every web host out there.