Movabletype moving towards open source

Moveable Type is a blog engine that is easy to use and easy to setup, perfect if you "just want to blog" and dont want to learn how to setup and tweak a full blown system. Moveable type is changing. Changing in a good way. Right now Movable Type is under the GPL v2.1 Open Source license. Or to be more exact, it made a "MTOS" version that is under an open source license.

While this is a great move for the open source community at large -more competition is general a good idea- I am interested to know in the real reasons behind this move. One of the usual reasons why companies "opensource" a proprietary tool, is when it is end of life. Is that the case for MT?

I'm not sure you really

I'm not sure you really understand Open Source if you put "open source" in the name of your product.
I'm not sure OSI really likes you to put "open source" in the name of your product.
I'm not sure the GNU Foundation likes the GPL to be called an Open Source license Eye-wink
I'm not sure there is a GPL v2.1 license. (Actually: no, I'm quite sure there is no GPL v2.1 license

By gaele (not logged in) (not verified) at Thu, 13/12/2007 - 3:23am | reply

Here's the catch. They're

Here's the catch. They're doing it the MySQL way:

http://www.movabletype.org/opensource/contributions.html

"The revenue generated by the Movable Type commercial product supports and subsidizes the continued development as Movable Type as a whole. To serve the thousands upon thousands of Movable Type Commercial customers, Six Apart requires the flexibility of being able to license Movable Type in a variety of ways. In other words, Six Apart needs to ability to dual license Movable Type.

To modify or change the licensing terms of software requires permission from all the copyright holders. Therefore, to make this process of dual licensing easiest on all parties involved, Six Apart asks that contributors assign their copyright upfront."

By gaele (not logged in) (not verified) at Thu, 13/12/2007 - 3:30am | reply