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...

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.