I wanted to start a conversation to help clarify people's understanding of Movable Type Pro's licensing. Under Movable Type Pro we offer two primary licenses:
- Blogger License
- Business License
A business license is required for anyone using Movable Type in support of an "incorporated business." Examples of an incorporated business are:
- Partnership
- S-Corp
- Corporation
- LLC, Limited Liability Corporation
- LLP, Limited Liability Partnership
Someone asked me: "how do I know if I am one of these?" A glib answer might be, "well, if you don't know, then you almost certainly are not." In the United States, to become an incorporated business you need to file paperwork with the state and sometimes file for a Federal Tax ID number. Incorporated businesses must report income separately from individual tax returns, hence the required paperwork. Yay bureaucracy!
Now, let's talk about the Blogger License. If you are not a business as identified by he above description than the Blogger License is for you. I should mention that the Blogger License is also for K-12 educational institutions. Correction: K-12 should be "Preschool through 12.
What I am most commonly asked regarding the Blogger License is this, "I am an individual, but make money from my blog. Am I business? Can I use the Blogger License for free?"
If you are just a blogger and make some money from ads, from Amazon affiliate revenue, or from any other source, even if you happen to make $1,000,000 (you lucky duck) AND you report that income on your individual income tax return (because I know everyone does this), then you are NOT classified as a business for the purposes of Movable Type Pro licensing. Technically you are a sole proprietorship and you are welcome to use the Blogger License for FREE.
Yes: Free! Get'm while its hot.
Anyways, I hope this helps. And if you have additional questions about the Blogger or Business License for MT Pro, please feel free to ask them below.
Reported on Movable Type 4.2
So basically you're saying that for any number of personal crazy projects I have I can use the blogger license, but for anything my company (Blacknight) does we need a commercial license?
That seems pretty clear.
I guess the confusion was with the licensing page where you had listed a number of users only under the paid license section which threw me.
The other thing that is a bit confusing at the moment is the customer control panel. I've ended up with a load of different licenses and the new ones don't seem to have the update keys anymore, even though they are commercial licenses.
Michele
I think this is much clearer and might call it blogger vs. incorporated entity.
Let me throw a couple of additional higher education confusions your way:
* If I am a professor teaching a class where I want to use MT, it seems like I am a blogger. I'm not incorporated. It's a personal initiative.
* On higher education licensing there are actually two subcases addressed in two separate parts of the site, neither of which seems to apply to the point I just described:
** The enterprise subcase which I assume applies to institutions wanting to provide MT to all of their students and staff.
** An administrative subcase where licensing is basically treated as it is for non-profit entities. That also does not really apply.
Non-profit licensing is hidden in a footnote and hard to locate. It appears essentially unchanged from previously. I might put the non-profit case in the table's business category. When I read the table, I thought my non-profit is not a business, it must get a blogger license.
I don't think this really makes sense. Most of the "probloggers" I know are "incorporated" as partnerships (LLCs) or as S-corps, for tax and liability reasons. That includes a bunch who are mentioned in the current MT.com site. So this would actually exclude most of them-- anyone who's making real money on the site isn't going to do it without talking to an accountant.
And if your intention is to give the community product for free to them, why exclude those probloggers (like us) who are incorporated?
I like this distinction because it points to something in the real world, rather than the nature of the work per se or something of that nature. Me, I'm sticking with MTOS because the licensing for that is wholly unambiguous, but this is a lot better than some of the other, fuzzier definitions of "regular user" vs. "pro" that I've seen.
What about a multi-author blog that's essentially just for fun? I'm in the middle of two projects, a website for a student group, and a forum for exchange students at my school, and I wanted to use Pro to get that going.
The way movabletype.com reads to me, it says "If you're one guy, even if you make money, you're cool. If you're more than one person, and not a K-12 school, you need to buy the license."
Realistically, though, the end-all, be-all is "If you're not incorporated, you're cool?"
IANAL, but the way I read this is that you must be a non-commercial regular user or a K-12 school. None of their other licenses cover your situation, since I would assume:
1) You're not incorporated.
2) This is not commercial.
3) You aren't doing this officially for the university.
You can run this by Anil Dash (anil__AT__sixapart_dot_com). He's one of 6A's more open and vocal executives and seems to always be up for answering a friendly question from prospective users.
What about governments? How do they license MovableType?
In the US, government customers are usually treated the same as large business customers except for the mountain of paperwork the customer requires. Therefore, you should probably contact the group that handles their enterprise licensing, unless your government entity is an educational institution.
While Anil is generally happy to answer any questions thrown his way, this isn't really his job and there's a sales team that he'd probably end up shunting you toward in the end anyway.
If you know you need an enterprise/large(20+ user) installation, go here. General sales and licensing inquiries go here.
(Yeah, the forms appear identical, but just in case they do end up different places...)
The biggest problem with this licensing for those who are upgrading from 3.3 is that functionality that used to be covered by free plugins is now built in (ie RightFields/CustomFields), but is NOT available in the MTOS distribution. (Which I found out AFTER upgrading from 3.3 to MTOS 4.25!)
That makes MTOS 4+ effectively crippleware, as you cannot easily add these features without upgrading to Pro.
I'm all for SixApart making money, but a little documentation of features available in each version is warranted.
They probably didn't make that list because it'd come down to 3 differences between OS and Pro. Have you checked the requirement list for using Pro? Most MT users qualify for free use of Pro.