Movable Type Goes Open Source

jamie forwarded a link to the announcement that Movable Type has been released as open source under the GPLv2. Here's the FAQ. Given that Wordpress, textpattern, and many others have been open source for years, how big a splash will Six Apart's announcement make?

Comments

Ok, nice, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...it's a little late now, we have all moved to Wordpress in the meantime...

Re:Ok, nice, but...

[Maureen Base]

There is still not a stable release. You can only get nightly builds through subversion.

Re:Ok, nice, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical FOSSie project: years later than it would have been useful, and highly derivative of other people's work. "Liberating" copywrited materials is optional. But encouraged.

Re:Ok, nice, but...

[Von Helmet]

Some of us have even got fed up with WP and moved on to Serendipity.

Re:Ok, nice, but...

[ThousandStars]

In a word: yep.

To be fair, however, by the time I came along to make the decision I gather the balance of power had already shifted to Wordpress. Does anyone know what the original appeal of MT was over Wordpress? I've been reading this thread, my post history shows, but I haven't seen any solid explanations of their histories.

Re:Ok, nice, but...

[Watts Martin]

Does anyone know what the original appeal of MT was over Wordpress? It was available earlier. That's mostly it. For a couple years, MT was far and away the most "full-featured" free (as in beer) blogging solution. When I put up my first MT-based blog years ago it was simply because nothing else out there could do what I want as elegantly as MT could without spending fairly big bucks -- the only thing I could find that came close to matching it feature for feature was the expensive and, uh, let's say extremely quirky Userland Radio. MT wasn't perfect; it essentially rebuilt static pages when you added a new post or a new comment was added. If you had a big database, this could mean a minute or two of grinding away in Perl scripts. The solution they proposed -- essentially, embedding PHP in your Movable Type templates -- struck me as kind of... hacky. WordPress (and a few others) solved this problem by, well, just being in PHP from the start.

But MT really dropped the ball when the licensing changed at version 3 to sharply limit free non-commercial use. More than anything else, that's what drove en masse adoption of WordPress, which by that point had achieved, if not feature parity with Movable Type, a solid enough foundation that it was clear it could achieve feature parity. And darn if having thousands of new users virtually overnight doesn't ramp up plug-in development quick.

I'm not sure Movable Type 4 has serious advantages over WordPress 2, although MT's template system is still far more elegant than WordPress's, and there are edge cases -- like one I may be facing myself! -- where MySQL is not available but Postgres is, which means MT wins by default.

There are other entertaining little branches along the Blogging Tree, like the sad story of TextPattern, but that's another topic.

Re:Ok, nice, but...

[Usayd]

That's pretty much it, the fact that it was most popular a few years ago is what has kept it going. I would say that it was moved into the profit making domain at a time when there was most to benefit and now they have to move into open source simply to continue the product. Cynical but true? I support WordPress for its transparency and what I have experienced as genuine open source values. Doesn't make it perfect but with MT commercial, WP was the best alternative. I doubt there will now be a strong pick-up on MT, but I could be wrong.

Re:Ok, nice, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

But considering how Wordpress' internal is a big mess and MT has enough features (like LDAP etc) as a replacement, it's still a good consideration.

Re:Ok, nice, but...

[Watts Martin]

I would say that it was moved into the profit making domain at a time when there was most to benefit and now they have to move into open source simply to continue the product. That's certainly possible. From what I could tell, Movable Type did pretty well for a bit positioning MT as the "commercial" blogging tool, providing infrastructure for big commercial sites that wanted to get into blogging as well as corporate internal sites. But WordPress seems to have worked its way into that market, too, as well as taken on -- and I suspect for practical purposes beaten -- Six Apart's hosted TypePad service. "Free for basic stuff, paid for advanced features" gets a lot more market share than "paid for even basic stuff."

Of course, the big unknown to me is whether Six Apart generates more revenue than WordPress. TypePad may well bring in more money than WP.com does, and 6A may still have a pretty strong corporate following. But in the consumer market, they've gotten their asses kicked pretty soundly, from all appearances. Self-hosted blogs abandoned Movable Type in droves, TypePad never got much traction compared to its free competitors, and their attempt at woo-woo Web 2.0 social networking, "Vox," seems to be more curiosity than solution. (Many good things have been said about Vox, but very few people seem to be using Vox.)

Nice, but

[dotancohen]

Although it's a nice move, I think that the change show only that being open source is "popular" today. There really is no need for the new license, other than getting a few diggs.

Re:Nice, but

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice to finally see decent blogging software that supports something other than MySQL though. I'll definitely be moving from Drupal to MT so I can stay with PostgreSQL. Ugh... Wordpress...

Re:Nice, but

[75th Trombone]

I have to agree with you, and further unload on this topic.

On and around the time Six Apart released MT3, they proved they had nothing but disdain for their loyal MT2 users. Let me count the ways:

1. They always said there would always be a full-featured free version of Movable Type. Then, as they worked on MT3 in the year or so preceding its release, they assumed complete radio silence on the topic. They said nothing, indicated in no way that there was a shift in their mentality of any kind. Then, on MT3 release day, BOOM: the two most important features, number of users and number of weblogs, are limited for free users. You may say those aren't really "features," but their Features page disagreed; even after MT3's release, two of the top features on the page were "Unlimited users" and "Unlimited weblogs".

   Many people called the people who complained about that freeloaders and cheapskates, but the fact was that most people weren't mad about 6A charging for Movable Type; they were mad that they went back on their word without a prior hint.

   But that wouldn't've been so bad, if it weren't for a couple of other things:

2. When MT3 came out, the license explicitly stated that you could only create one weblog in the software with the free version. People were upset with this, because one of the most common MT hacks is to create a weblog for your articles, one for your links, and maybe a couple of others, and then combine them all into one website.

   So there was a furor over that particular change. A couple of weeks or so later, 6A changed the license to say you could create unlimited software-weblogs as long as they were confined to a single web site.

   But they didn't say they changed their license. Oh no. They said "We've just posted a clarification to our free license, to clarify that you can have unlimited software-weblogs on one web site."

   This was weasel-speak, plain and simple. They didn't have the dignity or the respect for their users to admit they had to change their minds. And finally,

3. There's a guy who works at Six Apart by the name of Anil Dash. He has a weblog. At the time, his weblog had a special links section in the sidebar.

   On the day of MT3's release, he posted a link to the MT3 website in that sidebar. The text around the link said something to the effect of "Movable Type 3 is released. [Something something something something.] Let the complaints begin!"

   That's right. A vice-president (or whatever he was at the time) of the company made a snarky remark about his users' reaction to his company going back on its word on his weblog. (He Orwellized it away shortly thereafter.)

That last one especially indicates the mindset inside 6A at the time. They slowly stopped seeing their users, the people who got them where they were, as their lifeblood, and started seeing them as complaining cheapskate freeloaders. At some point between MT 2.6 and MT3, they lost their respect for their loyal base, and replaced it with respect only for their corporate customers. Going back on their word, not talking straight with us, and making snarky comments about us seem to pretty clearly indicate disdain for us, not respect.

So I don't really care about MT being open source, because I don't think their attitude has probably changed one bit. It's simply gotten to the point where the "cheapskate freeloaders" can help their corporate mission better if MT is Free.

Just another contribution

[bckspc]

FWIW, lots of the powerful bits that make Movable Type great have been GPL'ed for some time: Data::ObjectDriver, XML::Atom, memcached. And of course, OpenID has been an open standard for a while now, too.

Re:Just another contribution

[Anonymous Coward]

MT3.0 and the license that killed it came out mid-2004. XML::Atom appears to have been released in 2003. memcached (and OpenID? my history is fuzzy on who was originally working on OpenID) was inherited from the purchase of Danga (LiveJournal). While it's true memcached and OpenID now fall under the Six Apart umbrella, it is worth noting they (and their sane licensing) come from Danga. Six Apart merely held to status quo.

That is, it's not worth much to remark on their openness before this announcement. This is a different direction, not a continuation of any submerged open source affinity during the suicidal license years. They look doomed.

Re:Just another contribution

[ThousandStars]

While they might be open source, the additional and very important question is are they easy to use? Or, more broadly, is the system easy to use? I wrote about my experience with Wordpress in another post, and most impressive part of the system is how easy and fast it is to setup and use.

Even if parts of MT are open source, if they're not put together in a nice, slick package, a lot of people, including me, are going to stay away until someone else does the heavy lifting for us.

Sure, I could figure out how to make it all work, but I don't especially want to. The same general principle applies to Linux and OS X, explaining why I use the latter.

Re:Just another contribution

[Critical Facilities]

is the system easy to use?
I mentioned to someone in an earlier post that I recommend Thingamablog if you haven't already tried it. It's very easy, quick, small, all good things.

Re:Just another contribution

[makomk]

memcached has (afaik) always been open source. It was developed by Danga to speed up LiveJournal.com before they were bought out by Six Apart, and Danga had much stronger open-source leanings than Six Apart.

OpenID was developed after Danga was bought, but it was very much driven by the ex-Danga end of things. I think Livejournal and its clones are basically the only blog sites that allow the use of OpenID for comments, though Blogger's now finally testing it. While Movable Type supports OpenID, their hosted Typepad service doesn't.

Re:Just another contribution

[bckspc]

TypePad uses TypeKey... which is an OpenID server. See https://www.typekey.com/t/openid

Re:Just another contribution

[makomk]

Yeah, which means that if you have a TypeKey login, you can use it on other sites that support OpenID. You can't leave a comment on a TypePad blog using OpenID - you still need to register a TypeKey account to do that.

MTOS vs MT

[morgan_greywolf]

Right. It's PHP and Perl, right? So that means you already have the code. You can modify it already, you just, until now, couldn't distribute modified copies. All that really means is a license change and, well, in the meantime, didn't everybody already kinda move to WordPress anyhow?

Re:MTOS vs MT

[Ford Prefect]

All that really means is a license change and, well, in the meantime, didn't everybody already kinda move to WordPress anyhow?

Surely if you're a real nerd, you've written your very own blogging software from scratch?

I wrote the, erm, fantastically named BaaBaa-BlogSheep(tm), which is currently powering my game modification blog and, in a stunning 100% increase in number of deployments, now a general Half-Life 2 map news blog too.

It's based on PHP, MySQL and Smarty - I initially wrote it as a test-bed for trying out different templating engines for PHP, before using the victor in subsequent, proper work. Smarty proved to be marginally less inelegant than some of the alternatives, so that's what subsequent versions have stuck with.

I originally designed it without having ever seen the admin side of WordPress, Movable Type or any other mainstream blog - an administration's view looks just like what the public sees, except with unpublished articles, more buttons and links available. It's remarkably streamlined.

Would there be any interest if I released the source for it? It's incredibly light on the dependencies (Smarty and PEAR's XML/RPC are the only oddities) and seems to work okay - plus I wouldn't mind if I got a few of the Missing Features written for me. Along with some of the uglier, hard-coded-in-templates nonsense removing. ;-)

Re:MTOS vs MT

[morgan_greywolf]

Thing is that there's a gazillion blogging CMSes out there. Why write another one?

Re:MTOS vs MT

[suggsjc]

Well I wrote one from scratch as well. My original intent was to market it as a full-featured blogging platform that worked on a revenue sharing platform with my "subscribers". Previously I had dabbled with WP, but never really looked at the code.

I've since moved on, but I've still got the code laying around, and there is some really good stuff in there.

You question was why write another one? So here's just a few reasons.

1. Boredom
2. Curiousity
3. Anything you can do I can do better (*)
4. Spite
5. Others don't have feature X
6. Control of the code

* - As I said before, I really hadn't looked at any other code bases, but now that I'm dabbling with Drupal I've noticed a LOT of similarities. Although mine may not have been as flexible it was certainly more eloquent, which if anything, makes me feel good about myself.

I'll continue to use Drupal, myself...

[PaulGaskin]

But there's growth in the market for new Free Software projects to grow. Score another win for the GNU GPL.

Blogger and such

[Kostya]

I'm not sure how much difference this will make because of the various open source blogging packages (in half a dozen languages), but I also don't know how big a deal it is when compared with Blogger (now owned by Google). Using Google Apps to publish a blog under your own domain is pretty powerful. Sure it might not give you all the features of X or Y, but it works really well and it is only a DNS entry. For many of us maintaining our own boxes, adding a record to DNS is much simpler than installing (and maintaining) another web application. Some blogger apps are pretty trivial, but they still require database setup and maintenance. Setups like Blogger plus a custom domain are hard to beat. And for those who don't like it, there are all the other established, open-source blogging engines.

This sounds more like the moves made when a product isn't doing as well as it used to. You know, the desperate, last gasp type open source moves. It worked out well for Mozilla, but I'm not so sure about Moveable Type.

Re:Blogger and such

[Critical Facilities]

For many of us maintaining our own boxes, adding a record to DNS is much simpler than installing (and maintaining) another web application. Some blogger apps are pretty trivial, but they still require database setup and maintenance.
Not disagreeing with you here, but a suggestion if I may. Have you considered Thingamablog? It is VERY easy to set up and maintain. I, like you, maintain my own box but didn't want the hassle of having to set up and administer various other functions (MySQL, Python, etc) so I gave Thingamablog a shot as an experiment. I have to say, I'm quite satisfied with it.

Not that much of a splash

[Sinistar2k]

People must not care too much since Six Apart announced this a month ago at SoftSummit during a panel discussion.

Didn't they start out as open source?

[beadfulthings]

Maybe not, but the software was initially free and had some parts that could be tinkered with. They went to a commercial model with a scaled-down free single user version and a pricing structure for licenses for larger installations. Wordpress came in with their open product and pretty much took over--in terms of prevalence as well as quality and flexibility.

It's way too late for this to matter

[miller60]

I'm a long-time user of Movable Type, and used it to build a number of high-traffic blogs. But in the past two years my new development efforts have all been on Wordpress. The reason is simple: I'm not a designer, and there are tons of great-looking themes available for Wordpress. This is the advantage of open source - the Wordpress community has built themes and plugins to address virtually every need a blogger may encounter. Six Apart has simply never been able to create the same kind of ecosystem around its paid versions of MT. There are enough quality theme repositories for Wordpress that people can have top 10 lists of their favorite collections. There is a growing ecosystem of blogs that focus on Wordpress themes and design (check out the Weblog Tools Collection, WPDesigner andWPCandy for examples).

There is simply nothing like this available for Movable Type. They've changed the templating system in the new version, making it harder to migrate blogs without a redesign. Earlier upgrades within the 3.x version changed the database structure or forced many bloggers to change their URL structures. I was a huge fan of MT and invested countless hours in customizations, but the product has been undersupported while Six Apart focused on Typepad, Vox and its other hosted offerings. I understand the reasons for this. But Six Apart waited too long to go open source with MT and build the same kind of powerful open source ecosystem that has made Wordpress such a huge success. This would have been great two years ago, but it hardly matters now.

Re:It's way too late for this to matter

[stoolpigeon]

And it seems - getting access to all plugins and themes will requiring being a paying customer. At least if I understood him correctly when he said, "We'll be adding additional paid benefits for people who've paid for commercial licenses for Movable Type, with benefits like improved technical support and custom add-ons such as plugins or themes."

Re:It's way too late for this to matter

[tweek]

I think maybe they mean they'll focus on developing custom add-ons. Nothing is stopping someone else from making an add-on and making it open source.

Re:It's way too late for this to matter

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason is simple: I'm not a designer, and there are tons of great-looking themes available for Wordpress. This is the advantage of open source - the Wordpress community has built themes and plugins to address virtually every need a blogger may encounter.

It's true the people aren't sharing themes for Movable Type the way they are for WordPress, but that has nothing to do with open source. Both sites output HTML, and it's viewable by anyone. You just have to take the time to look at it, then write your stylesheet accordingly.

Re:It's way too late for this to matter

[Pollardito]

There are enough quality theme repositories for Wordpress that people can have top 10 lists of their favorite collections. blogs seemingly exist to create top 10 lists, so the fact that someone has created one in no way should be used as an indicator of the amount of quality anything. somewhere someone is working on a "Top 10 Numbers from 1 to 10 List" right now, and it'll be posted on Digg the minute it's done

Re:It's way too late for this to matter

[ThousandStars]

Well spoken. When I was evaluating blogging systems for my personal site, a book/literature blog, I chose Wordpress for almost the exact reason you describe; although the lack of an "export" function bothered me, I used it anyway because I write my posts in Textmate and upload with the blogging bundle. Since then, however, Wordpress has added an export feature, eliminating even that hurdle. I liked the default plug-in scheme and the numerous other plug-ins already there, as they allowed me to focus on writing rather than on solving technical problems.

More recently I began a business blog called Grant Writing Confidential with my Dad, and I had Wordpress install by our ISP because I was already familiar with it, in addition to all the advantages listed by the GP. By then, Wordpress had impressed me sufficiently that Movable type wasn't even in the running because I hadn't found any limitations or major irritations in Wordpress.

The big knock on Wordpress is that so many of the themes make it obvious that you're using a Wordpress blog. This has some validity and is true for my blogs, although a little bit less so for the second. Still, I think the reason so many blogs use a two- or three-column style is because it's logical way to organize a blog. Few people criticize books because they (mostly) have a spine and two covers and a table of contents and what not, while all that varies between them is art. I suspect we're entering that general phase of blogging, which also makes it easier to read blogs because you only have to figure out where the common elements are, rather than a whole new system for each blog.

In other words, Wordpress/Blogger motifs are creating a common user interface, making the presentation less important and the content more important. Sounds like my conception of what "Web 2.0" should be doing: making this easier on us. I'm not the first person to have thought along these lines, but it's still worth noticing. For that matter, /. could do worse than use the web-based posting window of Wordpress, with its "visual" and "code" views (he mutters to himself as he checks all his paragraph tags).

Re:It's way too late for this to matter

[HamletComplex]

Wrong. Plugins/themes are available to all versions. What you quote refers to the fact the commercial distro will have some additional features, which will come in the form of plugins bundled with the core application.

Re:It's way too late for this to matter

[stoolpigeon]

Which is it? Am I wrong or will there be plugins only available to commercial customers? Because your reply says both. Either they are all free - and then I'm wrong, or some are only available if you pay and then I'm not wrong.

Re:It's way too late for this to matter

[HamletComplex]

This potentially gets into a bit of terminology, in that what will be exclusively available to commercial licensees will be the "Professional Pack." which will include some features only they will have access to. At the moment, it's known that this will include(or only be) the bundling of an updated version of one of the existing custom fields plugins, which 6A has acquired from the developer. The only theme I'm aware of that's not openly available is the one used for the new forums at forums.movabletype.org, and that's because its templates are simply impossible to implement without the Community Pack that it comes with. So, yes, paying customers get bonus bits; this is not a new concept. Over time, it's expected that things will filter down as new features are added.

So, in practical terms, at this moment, there is only a single plugin that will be commercial-exclusive. And there's nothing stopping someone else from creating another such plugin and distributing it however they like. There is, in fact, already another custom fields plugin(RightFields) which hasn't yet been updated for MT4, for example. Custom fields have been in the plans for some time now, and I'm personally of the opinion that distributing the plugin like this is simply a convenient way to get a head start on its eventual integration directly into the core code.

In retrospect, I may have over-interpreted the original comment's "getting access to all plugins," as a claim that plugins as a whole wouldn't be available to MTOS(we'll have to wait for him to confirm/deny that), but where this all starts getting into terminology is the fact that the distinction between MT features and plugins can get vague in places. For example, beyond an internal rating system which can be applied to pretty much any object, MT's spam management features themselves are almost entirely contained in a plugin set(SpamLookup, which is actually three modules). The same for its theming capabilities(which function, for comparison is directly in the core code of WordPress.) CustomFields is heavily integrated into the UI to the degree you probably wouldn't know it was a plugin if you weren't told beforehand.
While this so far explains extensions to basic functionality, work is also under way to modularize the application, such that things that are "obviously" core functions like commenting will be possible to rip out altogether if you don't need them because they'll be "components," which are by and large just plugins with more than the usual access.

Ultimately, and bluntly, I'm very active in the MT community, and there are a lot of people who I've simply never heard of making lots of weird and patently false claims about what's going on while often simultaneously pointing out that they haven't used MT since they "sold out" and went commercial. I'd suggest that if you're really interested in answers you do some research of your own or swing by the various MT forums or mailing lists where we'd be happy to address any questions or point you in the right direction. It's impossible to chase down every instance of FUD going around right now, and frankly the only reason I commented here was that we were basically laughing our heads off over the responses earlier.

Re:It's way too late for this to matter

[simplerThanPossible]

Reminds me of the "whole product" ("Crossing the Chasm") - all the extra stuff needed beyond the core "product" to actually solve the user's problem. But how does Wordpress make money?

Re:It's way too late for this to matter

[stoolpigeon]

The post by Anil Dash seems pretty straightforward. On the other hand, you seem to be really working hard to get his words to mean something other than what he is saying. Personally, I don't care. I was just pointing out what he said. Bringing up people you've never heard of who are spreading fud is really just confusing the issue - because I'm guessing you have heard of Anil Dash and it is only the words in his or her post that I'm worried about.
 
I'll throw it out there again - just for fun.We'll be adding additional paid benefits for people who've paid for commercial licenses for Movable Type, with benefits like improved technical support and custom add-ons such as plugins or themes.
 
What seems key to me is that this isn't a discussion of what exists now but what will be added. And when those things are listed every single one is plural. So - don't worry about terminology or getting technical or trying to fight fud. The bottom line is that the people who make this product intend to sell a version that contains custom plugins and themes that wont be available to those who don't pay. Unless Anil doesn't actually know what's going on with MT. Which could be - I don't know who this person is.

Good job, MT

[Zarjay]

Oh, MT's open source now? That's nice. I would have cared a few years ago.

MT's commercial licenses are one of the big reasons why WordPress became so popular. WordPress has been in heavy development in the past year. Just last summer, a new version of WordPress was released every two weeks or so. It's no wonder why WP's user base has gotten so big.

WP is standards-compliant, has a lot of plugins for me to play with, and gets updated so much that it's getting a little annoying. Unless any of that changes, I've got no reason to switch.

Re:Good job, MT

[smellotron]

WP is standards-compliant, has a lot of plugins for me to play with, and gets updated so much that it's getting a little annoying. Unless any of that changes, I've got no reason to switch.

It also has vulnerabilities discovered fairly regularly (likely due to the loose way it treats data and input), deliberately ignores any database besides MySQL, and (checking...) a simple "about" page fails validator.w3.org with 11 errors using one of the themes provided on wordpress.com Furthermore, the frequent updates are due to the Wordpress guys following a calendar schedule rather than a feature schedule for updates.

I use wordpress.com myself because it just works, but if you pop open the hood it's a big spaghetti mess, and the developers don't seem to care. From an open-source perspective, I'm much more inclined to contribute to a blogging platform that sees value in quality software than WP.

Subpixel

[Kim0]

Perhaps Movable Type could benefit from the SubLCD subpixel rendering, which is free and unpatented.

http://kim.oyhus.no/SubLCD.html

PS: I do have a method for removing colour spatter, but it is not implemented yet, and it is also different from what I have seen elsewhere. Is this sufficiently important that I should implement it?

Re:Subpixel

[s4m7]

I don't get it. Are you trying to be funny?

Remember

[popejeremy]

Remember that Movable Type used to be free, and then they unexpectedly.started charging for it. I remember because I was using Movable Type for free at the time, and then found myself being told from out of the blue that I have to pay for an upgrade.

As soon as they slapped a price and legal requirements on the previously free Movable Type, hundreds of thousands of bloggers collectively said, "Oh gee, thanks a lot." and left. They felt snookered, and they were. They had been lead to expect that it was going to be a FOSS product in perpetuity, and it wasn't.

I don't care if they're GPLing this version of MT. Who knows when they'll change their mind again? And I'll get stuck with a broken system. Sure, Six Apart says now that it will be open source and free forever, but how are they bound to that advertising claim? I'm sure they could find a way to wriggle around it if they change their mind in the future just like they did before.

Re:Remember

[sofla]

My sentiments exactly! I wish I had mod points right now...

I, too, used to use MT when it was free, and I, too, remember feeling betrayed when they got greedy and started charging for it. And I agree, I wouldn't trust any promises Six Apart makes about it staying FOSS forever. They've blown their credibility on that score.

As the saying goes, "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me".

Re:Remember

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! I read that as, "And I'll get stuck with a broken type system." Too much PHP for me...

Re:Remember

[Eric Smith]

I don't care if they're GPLing this version of MT. Who knows when they'll change their mind again?

Once they've GPL'd it, they can't really unGPL it. (Though they could release later versions as non-GPL.) So it doesn't really matter if they change their mind, as it will be possible for others to continue development of the GPL version.

It's unclear why anyone would want GPL'd MT at this point as opposed to the alternatives, but having more Free Software is a Good Thing.

Re:Remember

[popejeremy]

Oh, but it does matter. I experienced first hand why it matters. I, and many other bloggers, started using it when it was FOSS. Then one day without warning, they stopped releasing it open source, and released all subsequent versions closed up. So now I have a Website that I can't get security upgrades for, and there is no FOSS community capable of making security upgrades to the old version, since there was never any need for it.

Sure, we could build a developer community from scratch to patch a now forked and dead branch of a no-longer developed application, and do it in a big hurry, but what are the odds of that actually happening in real life? Very small.

And of course now I have time invested in programming themes and modules for Movable Type that are now worthless to me, unless I want to stick with version 2.2 forever.

So instead people moved to a different platform -- one that won't screw us over again.

Re:Remember

[beoba]

The previous version was beer-free, but not Free. Now that the source is GPLed, it can be forked if they ever decide to close down again.

I was also a MT->Wordpress convert back when MT was closed up. In the beginning, I had assumed that WordPress would be getting some features that I found very desirable, such as the ability to run multiple blogs in an install. Due to the combination of waiting N years for WordPress to include this support, as well as their issues with frequent security updates (which means that every month or two I've got to do several updates, one for each site), I'm definitely feelin' an urge to move back.

Hey, maybe this will get WordPress back into action.

Re:Remember

[Eric Smith]

Did the original license back when actually meet the Open Source Definition? I was of the impression that it didn't, and that no one forked it because of that. Given how popular it was back then, it's hard to believe that people wouldn't have forked it if that had been possible.

Re:Remember

[Anonymous Coward]

For another example of this exact thing, read about the swgemu project, core1 and core3, and look at the same closed->open->closed->open cycle that went on there. It's the kind of self-serving drama that makes you wish less people would be fanboys and more would understand the motives going on behind their process. (Hint: if they only go OS because their development/uptake has slowed down, or because they're selling soem other gizmo tacked on the side, they're not really aiming for the 'spirit' of OS, just trying to 'ride the wave'.

Probably not that big of a splash

[MikeRT]

And it's a real shame. I used to use WordPress, but switched back to Movable Type when version 4.0 came out, and have no intention of switching back. From what I've seen with WordPress, it's gotten better, but Movable Type 4.0 is very, very slick and well-designed. It fully supports several databases, and has a sophisticated API for plugin-in developers that goes well beyond what WordPress offers.

Yet WordPress has been more successful because it is easier to drop it in and get started. Quite frankly, I don't think the open source nature of WordPress has anything to do with the number of quality themes built for it, since Movable Type has been free for personal use for a long time. Rather, I think it has to do with the fact that it is simpler to create a good theme with WordPress than it is with Movable Type.

What will be interesting is to see how WordPress fairs once PHP 5 starts becoming more commonly used.

Re:Probably not that big of a splash

[Otto]

What will be interesting is to see how WordPress fairs once PHP 5 starts becoming more commonly used. Why is that going to be interesting? WordPress works perfectly under PHP 5. It just happens to also work under PHP 4.

Re:Probably not that big of a splash

[smellotron]

WordPress works perfectly under PHP 5. It just happens to also work under PHP 4

Not that this is directly a PHP 4 vs 5 issue, but the tendency that I've seen is that people switching to PHP 5 also tend to be more aggressive about writing "correct code" (maybe because I've mostly seen the early adopters, who are interested in writing code that runs without syntax errors or warnings). I tried running WP about 6 months ago and had to disable E_NOTICE on my server because of all of the crap it spewed out.

Too little, too late...

[HerculesMO]

It's why Wordpress is now the de facto standard for blogs. The extra features, addins, etc.. all developed because it was a simple, open source framework for coders to do it.

Movable Type isn't bad... it just lacks the expansion wordpress does.

livejournal

[BokLM]

It's funny that they open source it just after selling livejournal.
They didn't have an open source blog software anymore ?

AGPL, GPLv3

[wikinerd]

Good to hear it's under the GPLv2, but why not GPLv3 or Affero GPL ? Was there any specific reason that made them choose GPLv2 ?

Great, now we can remove those exploits...

[tlhIngan]

ISTR that one of the crackers that found an exploit in Firefox ages ago worked at SixApart. Since the original article (down now) mentioned that they had no intention of letting Mozilla know about the exploits (so they can make their own "darknet" using the exploit), who knows what's in MovableType now?

I suppose that one incident would cast serious doubt as to whether SixApart's software or websites (including LiveJournal) should even be considered. SixApart's management is obviously OK with this kind of thing, too.

I suppose the bugs and exploits have been long fixed, but who really knows how many exploited Firefox browsers are out there? After all, LiveJournal and other SixApart (ex-)properties could easily be spreading it. Or people using MOvableType and other software from SixApart may be unknowingly spreading it.

(Nevermind that the Pingback protocol first conceived by SixApart practically allows spamming by design, almost intentionally!)

did everyone entirely forget three years ago?

[Natomui]

They pulled out of the free-n'-easy market three years ago with MT 3.0 - and caused pandemic dissent across the blogosphere. A lot of the more vocal dissenters moved to (at the time) B2, or the very basic incarnations of Word Press. I remember talking to Anil Dash (one of 6A's first developers) at the time and he said that it was a small number of very vocal people who were upset - but now, if you look at 80-90% of the blogs out there - most of them say "Powered by Word Press" It is no coincidence that pricing structures for blog software JUST DON'T WORK. You're dealing with a different kind of community than hard copy software buyers - these are developers, nerds, et al - and we like it easy to modify and easy to get and with a large community since this IS our community base. All they're doing now is back tracking. Like hell I'm moving back to Movable Type. MT can rot in hell.

Not just publicity

[Infonaut]

There really is no need for the new license, other than getting a few diggs.

I disagree. Whatever Six Apart's motivations, this is good for users. While MT source code has always been open for review and always modifiable by users, putting it under the GPL will create a licensing framework that goes beyond Six Apart's users. At the moment it may seem like too little, too late. I switched to WP some time ago, as did many other folks. But I'm going to give MT another look now, just to be sure I'm not missing anything. After all, WP is far from perfect.

Re:Not just publicity

[dotancohen]

A licensing framework for what?

Re:Not just publicity

[Infonaut]

A licensing framework for what?

Building plugins, variations on the Six Apart codebase, etc. If people know the licensing is no longer at the whim of Six Apart, they'll be more likely to invest their time in projects built around the codebase.

Re:Not just publicity

[richlv]

this made me wondering. would it be possible to include code from one into another or are they too different conceptually ?

The thing is .....

[ajs318]

The thing is, Movable Type was already distributed in Source Code form (it's interpreted, after all). So even if it wasn't permitted by the usage licence, people effectively could take Freedoms One and Three by force, the same way people already take Freedoms Zero and Two by force.

I use b2evolution

[gr8dude]

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned b2evolution after so many posts. I use this platform for quite some time and I've always been happy with it.

I'm ok with Wordpress too, but I still prefer b2evo for its flexibility (not that WP is not flexible). The decision to choose b2evo over something else was made a long time ago, so I don't recall all the factors that influenced me. Since then b2evo has improved significantly.

Any slashdotter who is thinking about setting up a blog should also consider b2evolution.

Why not?

[Miang]

Guess they can afford to after selling LiveJournal to the tune of about $30 mil.

hurray

[nazarijo]

yeah, this is nice. i hate wordpress, using it is a pain. and i hate blogger, some really annoying crap in there.

having MT move to (as i recall BACK to) an OSS license is good, some of us can use it again in certain situations and not violate the license.

-- jose

Perl vs PHP

[hweimer]

The security model of PHP is a nightmare, therefore it is a good thing that we now have a mature and free CMS written in Perl. If it had been available some time ago, I probably wouldn't have written my own.

Accurate, But...

[reallocate]

An accurate summary, but I don't think it means much to SixApart. They are interested in selling MT. Customers who buy a product like MT care about a long list of other issues before they care about the license. After all, it isn't like those customers are going to stay up nights forking MT.

WordPress is a business, not a charity, too. It makes money from selling WP. The fact that the basic product is free doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things.

Remember, people who buy software don't buy code. They buy features and capabilities. (And, by and large, anyone who refuses to pay for software never was part of the market, so a business has little reason to care what they think.) When a product goes GPL, it can take advantage of the free coding labor of all those open source developers.

Re:Accurate, But...

[richlv]

i try to avoid paying fopr software as such, but i pay for feature development and support. am i part of the market ?

Word press is Good

[iamstiffler]

I like the word press, Actaully it is very easy to use... However. some body told that MT is better.. can you give some comparison as a webmaster point of view.. ... Yuppie Juppie

Eh?

[tehcyder]

I thought Gutenberg introduced movable type to Europe over 500 years ago?

Because GPLv3 is a failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Good to hear it's under the GPLv2, but why not GPLv3 or Affero GPL ? Was there any specific reason that made them choose GPLv2 ?

Maybe because teh Stallmanista's GPLv3's business and commercial hatred scares off any worthwhile users? It's kind of revealing when programmers are ditching the GPLv3 in favor of just putting stuff out in the public domain.

If your source is "open"... let it go. My FOSS longs to be free.

Too Little, Too Late

[Clith]

I was an early user of MT, especially since it was all Perl scripts that I could hack and modify. But then came the day I added some really cool but of functionality and tried to share it woth my friends.

The license said I couldn't.

In order to share my changes, I had to post diffs, which are extremely technical to use. I posted messages asking about just posting modified files, but was answered in the negative.

I found this extremely frustrating.

That's when I looked around and found something just starting up called WordPress, at around version 0.2 (I think it had a different name back then?), which was GPL.

I never looked back.

I do look forward though, and am now looking closely at things like Typo because I like Ruby on Rails.