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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?

6 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Just another contribution by bckspc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. It's way too late for this to matter by miller60 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    --
    RichM
    Data Center Knowledge
  3. Re:Ok, nice, but... by Maureen+Base · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

    --
    Would you please continue the petty bickering? I find it most intriguing.
  4. Probably not that big of a splash by MikeRT · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  5. Great, now we can remove those exploits... by tlhIngan · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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!)

  6. Re:Ok, nice, but... by Von+Helmet · · Score: 2, Interesting

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