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Movable Type Goes Open Source; Released Today

Hello. Open source blogging fanatics, it’s your day. Coming full-circle-ish — and probably well timed for the Le Web 3 event in Paris — Six Apart has just released an open source version of Movable Type. It’s called Movable Type Open Source, MTOS for short, and it is just the latest chapter in the continuing story of a company that strives towards the old adage “Power to the People.”

You may remember us telling you about this open source version back in August when we reviewed Movable Type v4. It’s a little late coming — deciding how exactly to take a commercial product open source was bound to be a tricky task — but as they say, it’s better late than never.

MTOS is a separate, open source version of Movable Type. It’s licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. Importantly, in a recent statement, the company asserts that “MTOS has every feature in Movable Type 4.0 along with several new minor improvements and bug fixes.”

This release shows the continued efforts of Six Apart to get people blogging, and is one of the significant recent steps they’ve taken towards re-invigorating the community.

They have always had a free, non-commercial version for use by the general web community. With that version, they were constantly implementing improvements, suggestions, and bug fixes from the MT community at large. In addition, they have released numerous open source plugins. So this move to a full open source version makes perfect sense.

What’s MTOS all about?:

• It provides the same functionality as Movable Type 4.0
• It includes all the plugins, themes, templates, designs, and APIs that work with MT4
• It works with other Six Apart open source technologies such as memcached
• It has a public Subversion repository for getting the MTOS code and nightly builds
• It’s the only open source blogging tool that has built-in support for an unlimited number of blogs and authors
• It uses sign-in with OpenID — no plugins needed

So what’s the biggest difference between the open source version and the commercial version? The commercial version is supported by Six Apart’s professional support team while MTOS is community supported. In addition, Movable Type Enterprise Solution (MTES) and Movable Type Community Solution (MTCS) are only available for commercial licenses.

They are also already planning new features and exclusive add-ons to the commercial version — but they aren’t giving details just yet.

The benefits of a community are enormous. Some of the current resources available include:

• A public instance of the FogBugz bug tracking system, the first-ever deployment of FogBugz for a large-scale open source project
• A Movable Type Wiki, that’s already brimming with tons of useful links and notes on everything from getting MT running to suggestions of new community-contributed features
• A Movable Type Community Forum, powered by MT4 and the Movable Type Community Solution.

According to the MTOS web site, all this exciting news has inspired people to start figuring out how to integrate, bundle or distribute MTOS with their own open source projects. It will be interesting to see what types of open source solutions are derived out such marriages.

You can head on over to Six Apart to get the code, as well a number of the open source plugins we mentioned early. Keep an eye on the MTOS website, as some aspects are still in flux or being developed, and there’s likely to be some interesting news showing up there shortly.

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