We've recently had a few questions raised about the licensing for Movable Type, and while the personal and commercial licenses are of course the definitive lists of your rights, we thought we'd summarize how Movable Type can and can't be used.

First, for personal, non-commercial users, Movable Type is free to download and use. We don't consider an Amazon wishlist link or a PayPal donation link to be a commercial use of your site, so you're free to update your weblog and maintain your site with Movable Type and all we'd ask is that you link back to movabletype.org and donate whatever you feel the software is worth to you.

For commercial users, we offer a few ways you can use the software. Businesses and other organizations can use Movable Type to manage weblogs on their intranets or behind their firewalls by paying for one $150 commercial License Fee per installation on each of the servers running the application. There are no per-user fees or client fees for using Movable Type in an organization. You can also use the system to update content on your public site, with the same rules applying.

Currently, if you're a web developer or designer, and you want to offer Movable Type to your clients so they can update their own site, or you want to use it to perform updates on their site, one License Fee must be paid per server installation, either by you or your client.

So what can't you do? You can't sell the software yourself, or redistribute it with changes, or offer it installed as part of a hosting service, either bundled or as a pay option.

Based on the comments and questions raised about offering support services, we'll be revising our licenses and working on creating a Movable Type Developer/Service Provider Network that will rely more on a software/service-provider relationship rather than that of licensor/licensee. We'd love to hear what you think about this sort of a program and if you have any ideas or suggestions of how it would work best for you as a service-provider or developer.

We just found out that MovableType.org has been recognized with the Best Practices award in this year's 7th Annual Webby Awards. The criteria followed by the Webby judges for awards in the Best Practices category fit this decscription:

Sites demonstrating unparalleled excellence across The Academy's six criteria: content, structure & navigation, visual design, interactivity,functionality, and overall experience. Best Practices sites serve as an industry benchmark for the most current, innovative, and advanced practices in Web development.

We're thrilled to have been recognized in a field with such distinguished competitors and such stringent criteria. Though the award names MovableType.org, we consider it an award for the Movable Type system as well and a reflection of the community that's been built by people using the tool to share their thoughts with the world. We thank all of you who've downloaded and used Movable Type, donated to support its development, participated in our forums, extended or customized the tool to fit your needs, or just contributed by spreading the word about personal publishing on the web.

If you're new to Movable Type, or not familiar with our company Six Apart, you may wish to read our company weblog Six Log to find out what we've been up to or check out some information about our company. And if you've got friends who want to get started with weblogging, we've built an easy new service on top of the Movable Type platform that's designed to let any user just sign up and start publishing. It's called TypePad, and it's coming soon.