But I'm also not a cheapskate.

It's not that people expect that the internet is free. That's an overly simplistic quite blidnly from the developer's point of view.

First, people will move to a service that's free. And why the heck wouldn't they? If it's as good as MT, or even almost as good, why shouldn't I use it if it's free? This isn't even an issue of morality as it was with mp3s and p2p. If something costs $69, and something of equal value costs $0, why should I _not_ choose the $0? So of course people will transfer to free blog software. And, the result is that that software will get better as people have made MT better.

Which brings me to my second point. MT became what is very much because of the community that surrounded it. Asking $69 (a discounted price!) is an insult to people that feel thay _made_ MT what it is.

Thirdly, People don't think the internet is free. They're paying for their net access, and they're paying for their webhosting. People pay for livejournal, and they pay for blogger. It goes without saying that they should probably be paying for MT as well. But $69, again a discounted price (!), is excessive. I might even say greedy. SixApart would have done much better - MUCH better - if they'd charged $40-60 for a personal license, and more for a license. Simple. Now, people won't pay the $69 at all.

Limiting the amount of blogs created hurts SixApart more than the money will help.