Six Apart announced yesterday that Movable Type 4.0 will have a GPL version. This is big news. It certainly raises a lot of questions in my mind. Where would I be today had Movable Type 3.0 been released with a GPL license in 2004? Where would WordPress be? How will this affect Movable Type’s market share, and how will it affect the way Six Apart is regarded in the blogging world?
My reasons for switching to WordPress weren’t completely philosophical. Although Mark Pilgrim’s “Freedom 0” was a big motivating factor, I had been frustrated with Movable Type for technical reasons. But it is arguable that many people would not have switched to WordPress had the MT 3.0 pricing structure not left such a bitter taste in bloggers’ mouths.
As for how this news will affect 6A’s status in the blogging community and the FOSS community, only time will tell. Releasing the software as GPL isn’t enough. They’ll have to be much more open about their development, and encourage the building of a developer community around the software. There’s little free PR gained by the mere release of the software through the GPL.
Another interesting question was raised when I read this portion of the announcement:
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.
Unlesss I’m misreading “form the core,” this suggests that the commercial version of Movable Type will be built on the open source version of Movable Type. This means that the commercial version will also have to be released under the GPL (to anyone who buys a license to the commercial version). In that case, why bother releasing two versions? Why not just offer “official” support for Movable Type from Six Apart and have that be the business model?