Movable Type Open Source

(via blog.wohlrapp.com among others)

The folks at SixApart have announced that coinciding with the release of Movable Type 4, there will be an open source edition of Movable Type, which will form the basis for the commercial products.

The Movable Type Open Source Project was announced in conjunction with the launch of the Movable Type 4 Beta on June 5th, 2007. The MTOS Project is a community and Six Apart driven project that will produce an open souce [sic] version of the Movable Type Publishing Platform that will form the core of all other Movable Type products.

I can understand Rod Begbie’s quip (”I’ll take ‘Two Years Too Late’ for $400, please, Alex”) and I too found the inability to spell “open source” correctly rather strange - I guess MovableType doesn’t have built-in spell check, even in 4.0 beta?.

I tried to leave a comment on the announcement page asking them about the relationship between the MTOS version to come and the existing Movable Type Enterprise edition - but their openID login seems broken. (At least it fails on my openID in firefox on linux: “Could not discover claimed identity: empty_url: Empty URL”). That may also be why no one’s yet corrected the spelling of “souce” in the first paragraph.

I assume that the “Enterprise” edition will continue to be sold commercially with the OS code underlying it - but how much will be “held back” for the enterprise edition? Also unspecified is what relationship, if any, the MTOS code base will have to Six Apart’s other commercial offerings - Vox, for example, which is a hosted service.

I do think, though, that this will have a positive impact - for Six Apart and for enterprises trying to figure out how to leverage blogging platforms in the context of intranets and collaboration spaces as well as marketing efforts and corporate communications.

With the Enterprise 2.0 conference coming up next week, I’ve been thinking about blogging platforms as part of an overall corporate framework for knowledge management, collaboration, and the like - as part of an Enterprise 2.0 solution, in short. Not having an open source version made MovableType more difficult to leverage in such an approach, and having one should open up new opportunities for interesting combinations. (Movable Type was already bundled into Suite Two offering, but that is a closed source, fixed bundle - not really an open framework).

MTOS should be available in Q3 of 2007.