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

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.

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."

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.

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: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.