Ben and Mena Trott are widely acknowledged to be very nice people. The young married couple have been doing a favour for the wider internet community for three years now. Their software, Moveable Type, has been available for free personal use throughout that time, and has become one of the most popular applications for maintaining a personal web site or weblog. It's been put to use as the main content management system on a number of high-profile sites, most notably consumer advice portal About.com. It's become hugely popular in Europe and Japan, as well as the USA, where the Trotts are based. Thanks to Moveable Type, hundreds of thousands of people have been able to set up a sophisticated web site packed with smart features, without having to worry about doing any programming or messing about with HTML, the language that web pages are made of. Instead, users of Moveable Type (MT) were able to get on with the important task of writing and creating their own content. Because the software came with a built-in search engine and a system allowing people to assign their content to as many categories as they wished, it made building a web site with advanced navigation systems almost effortless. Moveable Type was born as a cool bit of software created by the Trotts because they thought it might be useful. Since then, the couple have quit their day jobs and invested all their time (and a considerable amount of money) turning Moveable Type into a global business, called Six Apart. Until recently, everything was going swimmingly. Then Six Apart announced an upgrade for Moveable Type, and with it a new pricing structure. From now on, they declared, people would only be able to use Moveable Type for free if they used it for one person, with a maximum of three weblogs or sites. To say this announcement upset the apple cart is an understatement. Suddenly, thousands of web site owners around the world found that if they wanted to upgrade to this new version of Moveable Type, they would have to pay. Prices started from 60 dollars and went up to as much as 600 dollars. There was uproar. People posted angry missives accusing Six Apart of selling out, and of becoming "greedy". Ironically, many of these rants were posted on web sites operated by older installations of... you guessed it, Moveable Type. It's different from the kind of software you might be used to, the kind that sits on your PC. MT is installed on the computer where the web site lives, usually called the "server" or "host". It is controlled by visiting a web page. Users have to log in with a password, and once they have gained access they can add new pages to their web site, edit existing ones, or fiddle with templates and other settings to change the way the site looks. Older versions of MT meant that one copy of the software could handle many different sites. Dozens of people might be able to use one installation, controlling dozens more web sites. The new restrictions clamp down on that. In a statement on the Six Apart web site, Mena Trott said the company considered it fair to ask people who used the software more to pay more to do so. Amid the uproar, there were some voices of reason. Several worthy commentators pointed out that for three years, most users had enjoyed the benefits of using MT without shelling out a penny for it. Several said that 60 dollars (about £40) was very good value for such powerful software. | 
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