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...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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.