Comments for Movable Type Goes Open Source Today

Movable Type Goes Open Source Today

2007-12-12T14:00:01Z

Today Six Apart is officially making its Movable Type publishing platform open source, just under four months after the launch of Movable Type 4 and six months after the open sourcing announcement in June. This means that as of today, MT users can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose they choose.

Importantly, it also means that Six Apart has finally removed the one major advantage that Wordpress has had over Movable Type - that it is open source. I'm sure representatives of both companies will argue that they still have advantages over the other (in fact, they usually do so in the Read/WriteWeb comments!). But given Movable Type's history - MT was once the darling of early adopter bloggers, but when Six Apart introduced licensing fees the tide quickly turned towards Wordpress - the open sourcing is both a necessary and welcome move by Six Apart.

MTOS (Movable Type Open Source) is an open source project that will consist of a GPL-licensed version of Movable Type 4.0 and resources for the community of Movable Type developers. It was originally slated for Q3 release, but was pushed back to Q4 - today to be exact. The main points:

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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 has built-in support for an unlimited number of blogs, an unlimited number of authors, and sign-in with OpenID.

Six Apart will be adding additional paid benefits for paid users of Movable Type in the future, with benefits like improved technical support and custom add-ons such as plugins or themes.

You can download MTOS at movabletype.org and find out how to contribute to the MTOS project and the MT community.

MTOS support is provided by other members of the community. You can buy a standard paid license for one of the existing Movable Type products if you'd like professional support directly from Six Apart.

In a blog post, Six Apart's Anil Dash says that the open sourcing of MT is all about "freedom". No doubt aware that Movable Type has some work to do to position itself as an open source publishing system, Dash claims that there is "a tradition of openness that Movable Type has embodied for over six years". He notes that "there's always been a free (as in beer) version of Movable Type" and "from TrackBack to Atom to OpenID, we've always released standalone open-source implementations of the key technologies that we've created or popularized with Movable Type."

Those are good points by Dash, but really the open sourcing was forced on them by Wordpress' success over the past 2-3 years. I'm glad to see Movable Type finally out in the open, because it's the system we use here at RWW (although we also use Wordpress on some of our network blogs). In the end, the users will win when there are two quality open source publishing platforms available!

Comment from Aaron B. Hockley on 2007-12-12

2007-12-12T15:55:12Z

"it also means that Six Apart has finally removed the one major advantage that Wordpress has had over Movable Type - that it is open source."

Based on my personal experiences, another major advantage for WordPress would be that it doesn't suck.

Comment from Keith Shepard on 2007-12-12

2007-12-12T17:07:35Z

It's too late for Movable Type. Wordpress has a solid reputation and strong community. Six Apart alienated a lot of users years ago with their attitude and policies, and I don't think they'll mend fences with this small move.

Too little too late for Movable Type and Six Apart. They're toast.

/Keith

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2007-12-12

2007-12-12T19:21:55Z

I have to disagree with the 'too late' line, which I see some other blogs are trotting out too. Based on my experiences so far with MT4 - which we've been using on RWW for the past couple of months - it is a fantastic system. I actually prefer it over WP currently (I have extensive experience using both and we use MT and WP for RWW Network).

But they're both awesome publishing platforms. I don't accept the 'too late' or 'sucks' arguments - if you actually look at and compare the systems (MT and WP), they are both excellent and have installed user bases.

Comment from Keith Shepard on 2007-12-12

2007-12-12T19:33:08Z

I disagree.

/Keith

Comment from James Lewin on 2007-12-12

2007-12-12T21:06:24Z

Richard

It's great to see MT be flexible enough to shift gears and adapt to the changing environment of the Web.

This is a win for everybody - Wordpress users, MT users, and companies that have stuck with MT. Everybody will benefit from more open-source blogging options.

Comment from lux on 2007-12-12

2007-12-12T22:50:49Z

Another voice for too little, too late here.

I was an early and enthusiastic MT user, but finally moved to WP earlier this year after watching the technology gap between MT and WP get ever wider. Once I realized how much faster and easier WP was, I completely gave up on any thought of sticking with MT. It's old, slow, and way too clunky. I don't miss it one bit.

Comment from Anthony Boyd on 2007-12-13

2007-12-13T08:58:24Z

I don't know. On Digg, WordPress has a reputation for buckling under heavy traffic. WordPress fans are always shouting that there are ways to make WordPress withstand the traffic, but then another WP link arrives on Digg, and people view it, and it implodes under the load. It just seems like they don't have decent defaults or something.

Movable Type is OK. The Perl part of MT sucks. Rebuilding your site after each new blog entry is not fun, but is completely optional. There is a dynamic PHP option that allows for a live site that needs no rebuilds. The times I've used MT have been for big companies, though. So we chose to do rebuilding so that we could have plain .html files on the server that could withstand millions of views/day.

For me, MT has never, ever died under load.

Also, MT is amazing at handling multiple blogs or even multiple sites from one location. WordPress just doesn't compare to that aspect. I'm not saying WP is worthless, but that isn't its strong point. WP is great at community, great at making easy things easy, and pretty decent at templates and other user-contributed goodies.

Overall, I'm happy that MT is Open Source now. I know some people are upset with MT, but this is a GPL licensed product. They can't take it back. They can't unlicence it now. So it really is free. And I think it really will put some pressure on WP to improve its weaker areas. It may take time for people to consider Movable Type again, but since it has some real-world advantages, there is a group of people who certainly will consider it in the future.

Comment from fak3r on 2007-12-13

2007-12-13T14:48:42Z

I remember looking at MT years ago when I was moving from another blogging app - but the lack of an open source version drove me away. I'm afraid it may be too late for them to take the crown from WP (I currently host 5 WP sites on my server), but they may well be able to fill a niche market if for a more IT savy (ie- RWW) crowd takes it under their wing. By open sourcing it they may well do that, perhaps I'll give it a go again...

Comment from Michael Heraghty on 2007-12-15

2007-12-15T10:40:54Z

I was a huge fan of MT in its 2.x days, and used to give it to clients as a CMS.

Wordpress definitely stole a march on MT, however. MT's paltry set of decent plug-ins and non-support for pages made it frustrating to use.

The dynamic build option that came with 3.x versions of MT helped but it causes so many plugin conflicts that I eventually turned it off on most sites. (This problem seems worse, if anything, with MT4.)

Having said all of that, I've recently started giving MT to clients again. For non-designers, it has always had the most intuitive interface, and it now has a great feature set too.

With support for pages, and thanks to the excellent customfields plugin, MT is finally a fully-fledged CMS for small businesses, not just a blogging tool.