Although it’s been long-expected, Six Apart finally transitioned its Movable Type blogging software to an open-source license today. In many ways this is a response to the success of Wordpress, the open-source blog-publishing software that is increasingly popular, especially among bloggers who like to tweak their own code. (TechCrunch uses Wordpress, for instance).
Now, Movable Type can benefit from improvements to its code contributed by its most ardent users. The competition should be good for bloggers everywhere who choose to host their own blogs (as opposed to those who use hosted services such as Six Apart’s Typepad or Automattic’s hosted version of Wordpress or Google’s Blogger). Six Apart’s Anil Dash, who notes the company’s commitment to openness in general, gives the low-down on how Movable Type took the open-source route. Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) is based on Movable Type 4.0. Dash notes:
—MTOS has every feature in Movable Type 4.0 along with several new minor improvements and bug fixes.
—All plugins, themes, templates, designs, and APIs that work with MT4 work with MTOS. MTOS also works with other Six Apart open source technologies such as memcached.
—MTOS is one of the only open source blogging tools with built-in support for an unlimited number of blogs, an unlimited number of authors, and sign-in with OpenID, with no plugins needed.
—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.
—You can find out how to contribute to the MTOS project and the MT community at movabletype.org.
—Movable Type Open Source is being released under the standard GPL license.
—We welcome and encourage the distribution and reuse of all or part of MTOS in other open source projects.
You can find more details here.
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first comment again…
opensource… now… so what?
Open Source but not free for “business blogs”/commercial projects?
Hey Erick,
Thanks for the writeup, we certainly hope to see Movable Type compete in the open source blogging space!
One note, we’ve actually dual-licensed Movable Type so that it is still available as a supported commercial version *as well as* the new GPL version.
@Tery, Movable Type Open Source has no usage restrictions; it is GPL.
Thanks,
–David
This just goes on to prove than opensource is the way forward. Anyone contemplating a new software platform will do well to build this into the business plan because unless you have some sort of patent for your product, you will have some competitor take it open source and then you will have no option other than going open source yourself.
They are releasing it under the GPL, which means it is free for anyone to use for any purpose, as long as you abide by the provisions of the GPL.
I had a hard time finding the open source version. Anyone know where it is?
That´s fine… nice job
cory, you can download at http://www.movabletype.com/dow.....l-use.html
@Cory, you can download it from the linked “Nightly Builds” on http://www.movabletype.org/opensource/.
I was surprised that to accompany this announcement they didn’t have a stable build ready to go…
Good for them!
Hm.. guess they started to realize that they can’t compete with the other open source like Joomla, Drupal, etc
Or is there another reason besides this?
Good work, MT! They’ve executed very well on this; i.e.: they’ve established their brand and enterprise revenue stream, and though it may be FOSS now, it will always be associated with the MT company.
The news around this is getting around the blogosphere very quickly…
http://techwatching.com/index......mp;range=0
Wordpress does dominate, and it does help to have Matt Cutts pushing it.
http://markjaquith.wordpress.c.....-benefits/
It will be interesting to see what Movable Type does now.
I hope they realize that because they made this in perl it will be unusable for 99% of dumb bloggers with a godaddy account.
As long as they know that more power to them. Until they recode it with PHP it will fail as an open source script vs Word Press.
CGI Perl script? No thanks.
good job
Do either Movable Type or Wordpress have limits on numbers of registered users, number of categories, number of posts per user, etc, that block it from being used at an enterprise level?
Much like http://www.peopleaggregator.org (never mind the rest), the open-source download link, while encoded in a simple url, is quite obscured… but this is really not good strategy.. because, those would want to find it WILL find it, and those who do not want to pay WILL NOT pay anyways.. makes people wonder, why the half-hearted effort.. just be “generous” (meaning, like, wordpress.org / mu.wordpress.org — only).. weren’t they offered us$200M but didn’t even want to take that?.. putting out a more apparently-positioned link doesn’t mean it kills all the enterprise value… but well, of course, whoever owns it controls it, and at least they have that rights (including not to make it open source in the first place)…
Grin.
“We’ve been giving this crap away for free to anyone who would take it for 6 years now, maybe if we call it open source someone will think we’re relevant.”
And judging from this blog post it worked.
WordPress, not Wordpress.
WP’s elements of style consistency has been [very] respectable.. which
reflects the [high] quality of their products..
though at times they do make it freestyle while in input boxes.. eg. -
http://wordpress.org/report-bugs/ and note “URL of Problem”…
@David (#8)… Are the versions there stable? I always think of nightly builds as being bleeding edge development and not necessarily stable.
Another great move by Six Apart. Congrats!
MT is way faster and easier to use than WordPress. I hate it when I hit the ‘back’ button on this site (built on WP) that it takes me to the top of the post first and few seconds later back to where I was on the page.
That is a good move on type pad part. The only I do not a like about them is that the charge a fee to maintain a blog on their site.
I doubt they’ll find many enthusiasts that will help them, it’s written in Perl…
as a potential user of both, i have come to the conclusion that MT is by far better than WP as it seemlessly unites publishing and group functionality. All the better now that it is open source…yeah for me!
but the price is OWIE!!!
why would anybody use that 7 year old unmaintainable perl code over wordpress beautiful PHP?
@18: It’s one of the links on the top of movabletype.org . It’s no more hidden than the documentation or the plugins. What are you talking about?
why do I not give a toss?
@29: noted.. guess what i said was, obscured..
take a look for yourself, for this description (let me know if you need a flickr screenshot illustration)..
1) a 300×70 px bright-color tab which says –
Download It, Free!
Movable Type 4.01
4.1 MB - 9/17/07
which links to http://www.movabletype.com/dow.....l-use.html
vs.
2) the 1/10th-of-the-above-tab’s size (sth. like 100×10 px in dark color) textlink which says –
OPEN SOURCE
which links to http://movabletype.org/opensource/
anyway, said for MT’s own good.. isn’t the Open Source focus MT is promoting - at least today?… anyway.. good luck (we don’t like Perl
anyways, grin.)
I have plaid with movabletype in the past and as a blogging platform (yes written in perl) its still very stable. Its nice to see the company open it up and give it to the open source community. This means that others will play with the source and yes someone will take a shot at creating a php release of it. Others will give it a shot and make great plugins with it as well.
As for the release time, i believe that this may be their only issue because of the fact that wordpress, joomla, etc. are all out and all own a good chunk of the market already. I use wordpress and joomla for my sites and won’t really try to play with much else because of the time i have with these two scripts and i know how they work.
So as for everyone talking down about them lets give them atleast a congrats on finally coming over to the OS side and wish them the best.
Just my two cents
can’t type today sorry played and Movable Type
They had no choice, WP is quickly becoming the defacto standard for bloggers, it has a huge community behind it (ei: little staffing costs) and it really a solid program.
Jon
Huge mistake!
They should have consulted us first!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Good move for them, however they are too late in my opinion, they should have done this long time ago if they wanted to do anything like this. WP is standard and I am not even curious about Movable Type for my blogs as WP is considerably more advanced in development. I remember commenting to Guy Kawasaki about his blog and he couldn’t implement some rather simple features to make it more readable (he eventually did, but I suspect it was some hacking, most likely not on his part). I don’t think platform is what makes a blog but it is no wonder he choose WP as backbone for his startup truemors.
Having said that, it is always good to have options and this is definitely welcome move.
How quickly the tables have turned. I used MovableType for awhile many years ago but got tired of the Perlness and eventually switched to WordPress. Once MovableType started charging for multiple users, blogs, etc, there was a mass exodus to WordPress. Personally I think it’s too little, too late.
Hey David….
I think you missed the FSF GNU Affero GPLv3 license…
It was designed to be used on *web software*, so why are you still using “standard GPL” ?
Please tell your lawyers to read:
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/l.....l-3.0.html
And don’t miss the opportunity to really help the community out there. By using GPLv2 you are allowing other people to get your code, modify it, build a really cool web service and *do not share* their code, because GPL2 doesn’t consider web users as recipients of the source code.
Instead, GNU Affero GPLv3 fixes this bug. Just read the license on the Free Software Foundation web site…
Best Regards,
Giovani Spagnolo
Telematics Freedom Foundation
http://blog.telematicsfreedom.org
http://www.webyes.com.br
Cool!