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.

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.

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.

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.