Timothy Appnel posts some updated comments on the whole Movable Type 3.0 thing and I think gets it more this time. He hits upon a lot of the big issues for me. The biggest being that I have no problem with giving Six Apart money. But they've priced it out of my range. I've paid for blogging software before. I bought Radio Userland and thought it was a very good deal (though switch because feature-wise it wasn't a good fit for me). I've donated to Six Apart for my current copy of Movable Type (for two keys). So I'm definitely up for giving them something for their work.

I also agree that it shows that people like Movable Type a lot and care about the product. I see things as they are now resulting in driving more people away from MT. I was talking to someone last night and said something to the effect of "probably 70-80% of the people who use MT won't be affected by the pricing much. They'll fall within the three blogs and one author category. But it's that remaining 30% who are going to feel screwed. That's the 30% who are power users. They host their own site. They like to tweak MT with plugins. They probably use more than one blog to cover the different parts of their site. Typepad really isn't a good fit for them (especially someone like me who users their shell account for screen and tinyfugue too :)). And they've probably gotten at least a handful of other people to start using it. They're the bloggers who tend to be quite vocal and have a fair number of readers." And these are the people that are feeling alienated right now.

Would I still recommend Movable Type to someone as things are at this moment? Yes. But not as strongly as I have before. I'd make sure they understand the pricing. But I'd also tell them to check out things like WordPress to see what they thought of that. As far as TypePad is concerned, I've recommended TypePad to a lot of people out there too and think it's great for someone just starting out or someone who isn't a control freak like me.