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Movable Type Goes Open Source

Posted by kdawson on from the blog-this dept.

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?

4 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Not that much of a splash by Sinistar2k · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  2. Re:It's way too late for this to matter by stoolpigeon · · Score: 3, Informative

    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."

    --
    It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
  3. I use b2evolution by gr8dude · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    The saddest poem
  4. Re:Ok, nice, but... by Watts+Martin · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.