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...

[Von Helmet]

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

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.

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

[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

[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.

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. ;-)

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.