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Movable Type Goes Open Source 78

Posted by kdawson 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?
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Movable Type Goes Open Source More

Movable Type Goes Open Source

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  • Ok, nice, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 13, 2007 @09:29AM (#21683045)
    ...it's a little late now, we have all moved to Wordpress in the meantime...

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Maureen Base ( 933868 )
      There is still not a stable release. You can only get nightly builds through subversion.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Von Helmet ( 727753 )

      Some of us have even got fed up with WP and moved on to Serendipity [s9y.org].

    • In a word: yep [slashdot.org].

      To be fair, however, by the time I came along to make the decision I gather the balance of power had already shifted to Wordpress. Does anyone know what the original appeal of MT was over Wordpress? I've been reading this thread, my post history shows, but I haven't seen any solid explanations of their histories.

      • Re:Ok, nice, but... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Watts Martin ( 3616 ) on Thursday December 13, 2007 @04:21PM (#21688510) Homepage

        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.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Usayd ( 845539 )
          That's pretty much it, the fact that it was most popular a few years ago is what has kept it going. I would say that it was moved into the profit making domain at a time when there was most to benefit and now they have to move into open source simply to continue the product. Cynical but true? I support WordPress for its transparency and what I have experienced as genuine open source values. Doesn't make it perfect but with MT commercial, WP was the best alternative. I doubt there will now be a strong pick

          • I would say that it was moved into the profit making domain at a time when there was most to benefit and now they have to move into open source simply to continue the product.

            That's certainly possible. From what I could tell, Movable Type did pretty well for a bit positioning MT as the "commercial" blogging tool, providing infrastructure for big commercial sites that wanted to get into blogging as well as corporate internal sites. But WordPress seems to have worked its way into that market, too, as well as taken on -- and I suspect for practical purposes beaten -- Six Apart's hosted TypePad service. "Free for basic stuff, paid for advanced features" gets a lot more market share

        • Accurate, But... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by reallocate ( 142797 )
          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.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by richlv ( 778496 )
            i try to avoid paying fopr software as such, but i pay for feature development and support. am i part of the market ?

  • Nice, but (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dotancohen ( 1015143 ) on Thursday December 13, 2007 @09:35AM (#21683115) Homepage
    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.
    • But there's growth in the market for new Free Software projects to grow. Score another win for the GNU GPL.

    • Not just publicity (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Infonaut ( 96956 )

      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 missi

      • A licensing framework for what?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Infonaut ( 96956 )

          A licensing framework for what?

          Building plugins, variations on the Six Apart codebase, etc. If people know the licensing is no longer at the whim of Six Apart, they'll be more likely to invest their time in projects built around the codebase.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by richlv ( 778496 )
        this made me wondering. would it be possible to include code from one into another or are they too different conceptually ?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by 75th Trombone ( 581309 ) *

      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

  • Just another contribution (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bckspc ( 172870 ) on Thursday December 13, 2007 @09:38AM (#21683145) Homepage
    FWIW, lots of the powerful bits that make Movable Type great have been GPL'ed for some time: Data::ObjectDriver [cpan.org], XML::Atom [cpan.org], memcached [danga.com]. And of course, OpenID [openid.net] has been an open standard for a while now, too.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ThousandStars ( 556222 )
      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 [slashdot.org], 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 h

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by makomk ( 752139 )
      memcached has (afaik) always been open source. It was developed by Danga to speed up LiveJournal.com before they were bought out by Six Apart, and Danga had much stronger open-source leanings than Six Apart.

      OpenID was developed after Danga was bought, but it was very much driven by the ex-Danga end of things. I think Livejournal and its clones are basically the only blog sites that allow the use of OpenID for comments, though Blogger's now finally testing it. While Movable Type supports OpenID, their hos

  • MTOS vs MT (Score:2, Insightful)

    by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 )
    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: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Ford Prefect ( 8777 )

      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 [hylobatidae.org] and, in a stunning 100% increase in number of deployments, now a general Half-Life 2 map news blog [hylobatidae.org] too.

      It's based on PHP, MySQL and Smarty - I initially wrote it as a test-bed for tr

      • Thing is that there's a gazillion blogging CMSes out there. Why write another one?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by suggsjc ( 726146 )
          Well I wrote one from scratch as well. My original intent was to market it as a full-featured blogging platform that worked on a revenue sharing platform with my "subscribers". Previously I had dabbled with WP, but never really looked at the code.

          I've since moved on, but I've still got the code laying around, and there is some really good stuff in there.

          You question was why write another one? So here's just a few reasons.
          1. Boredom
          2. Curiousity
          3. Anything you can do I can do better (*)
          4. Spite
          5. Others don't

  • Blogger and such (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kostya ( 1146 ) on Thursday December 13, 2007 @09:42AM (#21683205) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • 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.

      Not disagreeing with you here, but a suggestion if I may. Have you considered Thingamablog [sourceforge.net]? It is VERY easy to set up and maintain. I, like you, maintain my own box but didn't want the hassle of having to set up and administer various other functions (MySQL, Python, etc) so I gave Thingamablog a shot as an experiment. I have to say, I'm quite satisfied with it.

  • Not that much of a splash (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sinistar2k ( 225578 ) on Thursday December 13, 2007 @09:44AM (#21683217)
    People must not care too much since Six Apart announced this a month ago at SoftSummit during a panel discussion.
  • Maybe not, but the software was initially free and had some parts that could be tinkered with. They went to a commercial model with a scaled-down free single user version and a pricing structure for licenses for larger installations. Wordpress came in with their open product and pretty much took over--in terms of prevalence as well as quality and flexibility.

  • It's way too late for this to matter (Score:5, Interesting)

    by miller60 ( 554835 ) on Thursday December 13, 2007 @09:44AM (#21683229) Homepage
    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 [wordpressreworked.com] of their favorite collections. There is a growing ecosystem of blogs that focus on Wordpress themes and design (check out the Weblog Tools Collection [weblogtool...ection.com], WPDesigner [wpdesigner.com] andWPCandy [wpcandy.com] 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 (Score:4, Informative)

      by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) * <bittercode@gmail> on Thursday December 13, 2007 @09:56AM (#21683331) Homepage Journal
      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."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tweek ( 18111 )
        I think maybe they mean they'll focus on developing custom add-ons. Nothing is stopping someone else from making an add-on and making it open source.
      • Wrong. Plugins/themes are available to all versions. What you quote refers to the fact the commercial distro will have some additional features, which will come in the form of plugins bundled with the core application.
        • Which is it? Am I wrong or will there be plugins only available to commercial customers? Because your reply says both. Either they are all free - and then I'm wrong, or some are only available if you pay and then I'm not wrong.
          • This potentially gets into a bit of terminology, in that what will be exclusively available to commercial licensees will be the "Professional Pack." which will include some features only they will have access to. At the moment, it's known that this will include(or only be) the bundling of an updated version of one of the existing custom fields plugins, which 6A has acquired from the developer. The only theme I'm aware of that's not openly available is the one used for the new forums at forums.movabletype.or
            • The post by Anil Dash seems pretty straightforward. On the other hand, you seem to be really working hard to get his words to mean something other than what he is saying. Personally, I don't care. I was just pointing out what he said. Bringing up people you've never heard of who are spreading fud is really just confusing the issue - because I'm guessing you have heard of Anil Dash and it is only the words in his or her post that I'm worried about.

              I'll throw it out there again - just for fun.We'l

    • There are enough quality theme repositories for Wordpress that people can have top 10 lists [wordpressreworked.com] of their favorite collections.

      blogs seemingly exist to create top 10 lists, so the fact that someone has created one in no way should be used as an indicator of the amount of quality anything. somewhere someone is working on a "Top 10 Numbers from 1 to 10 List" right now, and it'll be posted on Digg the minute it's done

    • Well spoken. When I was evaluating blogging systems for my personal site, a book/literature blog [wordpress.com], I chose Wordpress for almost the exact reason you describe; although the lack of an "export" function bothered me, I used it anyway because I write my posts in Textmate [macromates.com] and upload with the blogging bundle. Since then, however, Wordpress has added an export feature, eliminating even that hurdle. I liked the default plug-in scheme and the numerous other plug-ins already there, as they allowed me to focus on writi
    • Reminds me of the "whole product" ("Crossing the Chasm") - all the extra stuff needed beyond the core "product" to actually solve the user's problem. But how does Wordpress make money?

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday December 13, 2007 @10:04AM (#21683403)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • 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.

      It also has vulnerabilities discovered fairly regularly (likely due to the loose way it treats data and input), deliberately ignores any database besides MySQL, and (checking...) a simple "about" page fails validator.w3.org with 11 errors using one of the themes provided on wordpress.com Furthermore, the frequent upda

  • Remember (Score:4, Insightful)

    by popejeremy ( 878903 ) on Thursday December 13, 2007 @10:39AM (#21683849) Homepage

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by sofla ( 969715 )
      My sentiments exactly! I wish I had mod points right now...

      I, too, used to use MT when it was free, and I, too, remember feeling betrayed when they got greedy and started charging for it. And I agree, I wouldn't trust any promises Six Apart makes about it staying FOSS forever. They've blown their credibility on that score.

      As the saying goes, "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me".

    • I don't care if they're GPLing this version of MT. Who knows when they'll change their mind again?

      Once they've GPL'd it, they can't really unGPL it. (Though they could release later versions as non-GPL.) So it doesn't really matter if they change their mind, as it will be possible for others to continue development of the GPL version.

      It's unclear why anyone would want GPL'd MT at this point as opposed to the alternatives, but having more Free Software is a Good Thing.

      • Oh, but it does matter. I experienced first hand why it matters. I, and many other bloggers, started using it when it was FOSS. Then one day without warning, they stopped releasing it open source, and released all subsequent versions closed up. So now I have a Website that I can't get security upgrades for, and there is no FOSS community capable of making security upgrades to the old version, since there was never any need for it.

        Sure, we could build a developer community from scratch to patch a now forked
        • Did the original license back when actually meet the Open Source Definition [opensource.org]? I was of the impression that it didn't, and that no one forked it because of that. Given how popular it was back then, it's hard to believe that people wouldn't have forked it if that had been possible.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by beoba ( 867477 )
      The previous version was beer-free, but not Free. Now that the source is GPLed, it can be forked if they ever decide to close down again.

      I was also a MT->Wordpress convert back when MT was closed up. In the beginning, I had assumed that WordPress would be getting some features that I found very desirable, such as the ability to run multiple blogs in an install. Due to the combination of waiting N years for WordPress to include this support, as well as their issues with frequent security updates (which me

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday December 13, 2007 @10:54AM (#21684105)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Otto ( 17870 )

      What will be interesting is to see how WordPress fairs once PHP 5 starts becoming more commonly used.
      Why is that going to be interesting? WordPress works perfectly under PHP 5. It just happens to also work under PHP 4.
      • WordPress works perfectly under PHP 5. It just happens to also work under PHP 4

        Not that this is directly a PHP 4 vs 5 issue, but the tendency that I've seen is that people switching to PHP 5 also tend to be more aggressive about writing "correct code" (maybe because I've mostly seen the early adopters, who are interested in writing code that runs without syntax errors or warnings). I tried running WP about 6 months ago and had to disable E_NOTICE on my server because of all of the crap it spewed out.

  • It's why Wordpress is now the de facto standard for blogs. The extra features, addins, etc.. all developed because it was a simple, open source framework for coders to do it.

    Movable Type isn't bad... it just lacks the expansion wordpress does.
  • It's funny that they open source it just after selling livejournal.
    They didn't have an open source blog software anymore ?
  • Good to hear it's under the GPLv2, but why not GPLv3 or Affero GPL ? Was there any specific reason that made them choose GPLv2 ?
  • ISTR that one of the crackers that found an exploit in Firefox [slashdot.org] ages ago worked at SixApart [slashdot.org]. 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 th
  • The thing is, Movable Type was already distributed in Source Code form (it's interpreted, after all). So even if it wasn't permitted by the usage licence, people effectively could take Freedoms One and Three by force, the same way people already take Freedoms Zero and Two by force.

  • I use b2evolution (Score:4, Informative)

    by gr8dude ( 832945 ) on Thursday December 13, 2007 @01:43PM (#21686717) Homepage
    I'm surprised that no one has mentioned b2evolution [b2evolution.net] 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.
  • Guess they can afford to after selling LiveJournal [kommersant.com] to the tune of about $30 mil.
  • yeah, this is nice. i hate wordpress, using it is a pain. and i hate blogger, some really annoying crap in there.

    having MT move to (as i recall BACK to) an OSS license is good, some of us can use it again in certain situations and not violate the license.

    -- jose
  • The security model of PHP is a nightmare, therefore it is a good thing that we now have a mature and free CMS written in Perl. If it had been available some time ago, I probably wouldn't have written my own [osreviews.net].
  • I thought Gutenberg introduced movable type to Europe over 500 years ago?
  • I was an early user of MT, especially since it was all Perl scripts that I could hack and modify. But then came the day I added some really cool but of functionality and tried to share it woth my friends.

    The license said I couldn't.

    In order to share my changes, I had to post diffs, which are extremely technical to use. I posted messages asking about just posting modified files, but was answered in the negative.

    I found this extremely frustrating.

    That's when I looked around and found something just starting u

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