Today, he shared this quote from Anil Dash:

“It’s clear that, even those who are privileged by access and wealth and the ability to amplify their own voices have anticipated that we’ll all be disenfranchised by the private companies that own and control our networks of communication. And yet, most of our effort and ambition in the technology industry are not going towards building for the open web.”

Anil Dash, The Web in Danger, Nov 16th, 2009

Oh, how clear it is. As I commented on Simon’s post:

Anil is a VP at Six Apart.

Why do images on TypePad not have file name extensions?

Why are there no export features for Vox?

I could go on… I’ve emailed Anil Dash personally months ago about each of these issues. As has historically been the case with my interactions with Anil, I’ve only got hand waving back.

Here are the Get Satisfaction threads on those two issues:

• Explain image URLs in TypePad and why they differ
• How to export my Vox blog?

This is something that gets me emotional. Even if Six Apart did not compete with us (WordPress/WordPress.com/Automattic) in some spaces, this issue is one of my emotional Achilles’ heels.

For all of their tooting about the open web, not only are Six Apart’s main services not open source projects, but they have long outstanding issues with locking in their customers.

Being able to get your content and data out is the greatest fundamental of the open web!

Update (later the same day): Announced today at Web 2.0 NYC, Anil is no longer employed by Six Apart. He is now Director of Expert Labs. I wish him all the best in his new job trying to effect change on the greatest scale.

There are a couple of things immediately apparent from David’s tweat:

1. He has never exported a blog from TypePad
2. He has never written a blog exporter using AtomPub

Never exported a blog from TypePad

I know this because I’ve done numerous TypePad exports and also working through my customers trying to get support from Six Apart in the export. For most TypePad blogs, it’s impossible to truly export the blog. Six Apart provides no tools or documentation on how to export in a way that preserves the permalinks, and because of a bug in TypePad and an unpublished permalink creation rules that have changed over the years, it guarantees a tedious, manual process to truly export the blog.

About a year ago, I approached members of the Six Apart leadership team in the hopes that they would commit to fix this issue. I was really nice back then and the whole time until recently. Now, I’ve concluded they were playing games.

Six Apart CEO Christopher Alden’s even promised “A Bright New TypePad in 2008“, “TypePad is the only blogging service that gives you complete ownership of your blog”. Appreciate the humor of that? You are trapped on TypePad.

Chris, and all the leadership team will wave their hands, “AtomPub is the answer.”

Never written a blog exporter using AtomPub

Having tried to guide Ronald Heft Jr in creating AtomPub exporters for TypePad and Movable Type, my only conclusion is that no member of Six Apart has written a blog exporter using AtomPub.

Six Apart VP Anil Dash likes to brag about them having helped create Atom and AtomPub. An exporter would have been one of the perfect real world applications to create as part of the creation of the specification. And wouldn’t you think if they were going to tell everyone that is the solution to exporting from TypePad that they would have built such an exporter? They couldn’t have because you can’t without hacking around AtomPub, a lot, which is what Ronald has done.

Then as we had it working, hacks and all, this past weekend, TypePad changed it, fixing one aspect of their AtomPub (drafts are identified), changing a few things that we can adjust to (changed the URL endpoints, switched to MT tag names for consistentency), but also breaking our importer:

• Can no longer retrieve comments on posts.
• No longer contains Pages.
• XML-RPC for trackback retrieval broke.

These issues have been reported to Six Apart and hopefully they will be fixed soon, but there is absolutely zero transparency. There is no way for us to check on the status of these issues.  Wouldn’t you expect the changes to be documented on the “The Official Everything TypePad weblog” and mentioned on “Six Apart Status“?

I cringe to think of the mess it would have been if we had already included the TypePad AtomPub importer in a release.

It seems that independent developers are left out in the cold.

The open web starts at home

Although, I’m excited by the work Ronald is doing, should it really be necessary for TypePad customers to come to the WordPress community to export their blogs?

I’m reminded of Dave Winer’s excellent article “How to do data portability” which includes “The best way to achieve data portability is to just do it”. That article really moved me, data portability, and by extension the open web, starts at your own company, on your own product.

How much longer do TypePad customers have to wait before they can export their blog?

If I wasn’t clear my video really is in no way a comment of the MT Pro product — I’ve never tried it. All the Six Apart teams are clearly very talented, so I’m sure it’s a great product. Though I’m pretty sure it won’t live up to “setting social networking free”.

Let’s break it down:

focus more on telling a story

People that know me, know that I’m all about the story that a product tells, and I think their video failed in the very way that he thinks they succeeded. I didn’t see a compelling story about the experience of Movable Type Pro. As my voice-over reflects, I saw a story that looked like any blogging platform and comments.

Both of us are extremely biased at opposites ends of the spectrum, so neither of us will get it right on this one. I would love to know the results of a diverse group of people each separately watching the video and sharing their reactions.

Honestly, we assume that that everyone else on the web will respond by copying great ideas, as they usually do. Hell, we want them to, so that more people can benefit from open communities on the web.

If you are familiar with Anil’s writing, you may end up with the conclusion, like I have, that he is actually obsessed with being first — or that is one of the SIx Apart key messages anyway. Maybe, it all started because he was Six Apart’s first employee. Check out the Movable Type blog, “A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide” [sic] article for a bit of a taste. If you enjoy the flavor, a Google search will lead you across the Web.

Of any software spaces, blogging is one of the richest for borrowing from each other and providing a consistent experience to customers — everyone benefits from this! I’d like to think WordPress has had as many firsts as any blogging platform, but even if that isn’t the case, I’m much more interested in focusing on doing it well. An example is the TypePad iPhone app was an iPhone launch partner, but the WordPress iPhone app is much more popular, has more reviews, and is higher rated, and we are still busy fixing and improving it.

Until then, they’ve created a parody of our video.

So me spending a couple hours playing around with iMovie in my own time (my 1st time using it), somehow becomes the Automattic answer to MT Pro?! And as I mentioned, no link love, no mention of my name (Lloyd Budd) — very, very bad blogger etiquette. Is iMovie that good that Anil thinks it’s a first rate production? I don’t think so, listening to it again, it is clearly the crap job that I remember doing for my own amusement.

without having your it look like another Facebook or MySpace clone

Did I voice-over the wrong video? I’m pretty sure it was their video that started with Digg, Facebook and MySpace. I might have misspoke, but I thought it would be obvious that I was referring to having social features beyond commenting like those platforms.

Our long-held reputation for publishing highly scalable, “Digg-proof” pages.

That is one of Anil’s favorite sound bites. I know Anil can’t seriously be suggesting that a file based “cache” is a whole solution to being highly scalable.

The funny part is that substitute in WordPress and you have at least an equally true assertion, ‘[WordPress's] long-held reputation for publishing highly scalable, “Digg-proof” pages.’ The reason why this sometimes looks not to be true is because of WordPress’s popularity.

I would bet, with no hesitation, that WordPress sites are far more often dugg, and that unfortunately some of those sites dugg, like my own, are on inexpensive, shared hosted environments that aren’t Digg ready.

For most WordPress customers the dynamic, responsive experience is far more important than “Digg-proof”, but for those that do want to prepare for a digg storm, there are high quality plugins like Super Cache and Batcache and many others that suit your specific configuration and needs.

There is no question that WordPress is scalable, fact is WordPress powers far more of the web than Movable Type, both in terms of web pages served and web sites. Fact is Movable Type doesn’t even power Six Apart’s hosted TypePad, and to my great frustration is incompatible in numerous ways — wonder why there is no Movable Type app for iPhone anyone?

remedy some of the missing features in WordPress if you have enough free time to find the appropriate plugins

Talking out the other side of his face, Anil will point out Movable Type’s rich plugin and theme collection. I’m pretty sure, Pro has even been presented as plugins built on top of MT at one time — bundling.

Of course, there is a huge collection, much larger, of WordPress plugins and themes, and I haven’t heard complaints that it’s hard to find the appropriate plugin. The wordpress.org/extend/plugins gives you information about popularity, and the interface will continue to evolve.

This past weekend, during Matt’s “State of the Word” at WordCamp SF 2008 (video will be online soon!), spoke to how that experience will change and how the actually WordPress plugin usage data will directly help WordPress evolve, with top plugins are polished and integrated into WordPress.

prominent independent security researchers do warn, “[T]he abysmal security practices of WordPress plugin developers places the entire Internet at risk”.

Why pick on the plugin developers brother?

That’s on top of WordPress being one of top ten least secure applications around

Each of the most popular blogging and CMS made the list, as does Linux.

the Department of Homeland Security’s data showing WordPress having twelve times as many reported security vulnerabilities as Movable Type

Should I even touch this one? Since Anil discovered that Home Land Security site I think that has become his favorite. I think it’s more telling that the Department of Homeland Security, and many other US government offices use WordPress (conversation).

And Anil’s article is one of the worst security related articles I’ve ever read. No security expert, nor scientific minded person would sign their name on it with it’s broad, sloppy brush strokes.

There is shame. Security was part of Matt’s State the Word. I don’t know anyone in the WordPress community that is happy with our security history, but it’s getting better and so are our developers.

There is appropriate optimism. With each release I see more potential security issues being reviewed and, when genuine, fixed earlier in the release process. The foundation of WordPress is also being improved to make security mistakes more difficult.

No one justifies the security issues because of popularity, but the IBM’s paper does reflect with popularity comes scrutiny. The loudest message from the paper might be that the bad guys have moved their focus from Windows to open source and to the web.

It seems only in the last couple of years has web security come to the forefront of the industries collective mind, and we’re all learning a lot. All three “top ten”, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are benefiting from each others improvements, and the larger PHP community is helping a lot.

If Movable Type was as popular, and under the same amount of scrutiny, I can’t imagine they would still be storing passwords as plain text.

I’m confident that WordPress’s security record will get better and better!

The great technology rests on top of world-class support, an incredibly talented professional services group, and a media services team that will help your site and your community succeed.

That last link there is a 404, and maybe that is meta irony there. All those links go to Six Apart services, as does one from earlier in Anil’s article “(We’ll even help you design it.)”.

This is probably the largest difference between Movable Type and WordPress. WordPress is community developed and support — world class.

I remember reading Anil’s comment on Josh Catone’s Read Write Web article “Six Apart Gets Into Microblogging with Activity Streams“. Here Anil didn’t like that WordPress Prologue — actually that’s a great example of someone not getting the idea, the story — but what bothered me was his attitude towards WordPress plugin developers:

There’s also an important distinction that this is a key part of our platform, developed by the core MT team itself. That means that it’s not a PHP script somebody cobbled together on their own to try to make a lifestream, it’s a framework to actually help open up *all* of these services

I read that as disrespectful to independent developers, WordPress or otherwise.

I see the Automattic team as the WordPress guide. WordPress is completely community created and supported. Automattic takes on the big (scalability) problems that the community doesn’t have the resources for like: providing the free WordPress.com service and fuding usability testing of a new WordPress dashboard experience.

We work with our community, not compete with our community. The work Automattic does is open source, released under the GPL.

Though the WordPress Consultants list, wp-pro and WP jobs are pretty good tools, currently, I expect much of the WordPress professionals’ work through personal relationships in the community. I think this is one of our greatest opportunities as a community. If you agree (blog about it) get in touch with Toni.

I mentioned that the work Automattic does is open source, whenever possible (Akismet is an exception). This isn’t the case with Six Apart’s Movable Type. I’ve written at length, “Movable Type 200% Open Source!“, about the missed opportunity.

With the release of Movable Type Pro, I think Six Apart’s current approach is bad for open source and actually dilutes open source. It seems others share my opinion, as on every thread there seems to be an open source advocate upset about MT Pro not being open source.

At first I was excited to see that the open source information was now on MovableType.com’s download page:

But then I realized the game this table plays is that the open source version isn’t good enough for “Bloggers”, only freetards like myself. I’m pretty sure, I’ve also read Six Apart telling people that the open source version isn’t tested or supported (but it’s the same software without some plugins, promise).

First, we set publishing free. Next up, social networks.

Actually, the WordPress community can take that first credit (not that I’m obsessed with 1sts) by creating the most popular installed blogging software, and it being open source. I don’t know about the next up, but there are many contenders, and WordPress and BuddyPress communities would be honored to be among them.

If I wanted to use Movable Type Pro for a social network with that Six Apart’s pricing it would probably be a social network of one. Anyway, without it being open source, it won’t be setting any one free, just making it a little easier to disobey the boss.

And that is why I think, Anil, people are so excited about BuddyPress, because it is among the real possibilities of setting social networking free.

our lead by planning to provide some of these abilities for WordPress in a collection of plugins that you should be able to assemble around Christmastime or so

There are so many reasons why I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Anil Dash has been pissing all over the web calling BuddyPress vaporware. See his comments at:

• CNET Webware “Movable Type, Wordpress becoming social platforms“
• Mashable, “Six Apart Provides Social Networking Capabilities with Movable Type Pro“

Where I come from, vaporware is a derogatory term. It’s clear that he doesn’t like WordPress BuddyPress being part of the conversation.

BuddyPress isn’t vaporware, a community is developing it today. You can download the code today. It is open source today!

I get emails and IMs from friends that have checked it out and are already grooving on where it is going.

Collection of plugins

That is just a packaging issue, and packaging issues are easy.

Christmastime or so

This coming from a key member of the team that made a press release seven months before the open source flavor of Movable Type — well over a year, if a public bug tracker is an important detail to you. The community will decide when the code is ready to be called a product.

Wow, this is way long. I’ll wrap it up here.

I didn’t find the Movable Type Pro introductory video well done or sincere, hence the parody. Am I really so bad for poking fun at the competition? Does the tension date back to Six Apart not being invited to the Blogger and WordPress dance off?

And TypePad simply blows WordPress.com away on SEO when it comes to search engine indexing. TypePad delivers your blog posts directly to Google Reader and My Yahoo and Blogline.

Are there specific issues that WordPress needs to fix to reverse the blow (hard)?

Anil, do you have any data to support the wild claim that TypePad has better SEO than WordPress.com? Of course you don’t. Further, I don’t understand what the 2nd sentence means (link with additional info?) or how it even relates to SEO.

WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (once you enable permalinks) share the same great SEO, and WordPress is generally recognized as having the best SEO of any web publishing platform out there. We are very fortunate for having numerous SEO experts that have long participated in WordPress development including SEO luminaries like Google’s Matt Cutts.

Here are a couple of the most obvious issues TypePad could fix to get on the path to WordPress levels of SEO:

1. For years TypePad’s URLs of posts (permalinks) had underscores between_words, which still are not well supported by search engines. In the last couple of years thankfully they now default to using-hyphens for new posts which allows search engines to recognize the individual words.

Unfortunately, TypePad still only includes fifteen characters from the title in the URL. Anil’s example http://www.celebrity-babies.com/2008/06/scott-and-renee.html didn’t show this, but it often results in words being cut off in the mid.

Lets look at the articles of one of my favorite bloggers who I know to be on TypePad, Seth Godin. What would you or a search engine think is going to be the title of the post with the URL of http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/the-marketing-o.html . No, it isn’t “The Marketing O’”, it’s “The Marketing of Fear”. If you look at his other articles must suffer from this same problem.

If you want TypePad URL SEO you have to limit your titles to a couple of words?!

2. TypePad sets an article’s URL when a draft is first made and doesn’t update it when the title is updated. This one is the far more annoying and potentially embarrassing if the original title was inappropriate.

Lets look at the posts of another one of my favorite bloggers who I know to be on TypePad, Steve Rubel. Just looking at his posts on the front page, I only have to look to the 2nd post from the top to see an example of this problem. The title is “Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing”, but the URL is http://www.micropersuasion.com/2008/06/how-friendfeed.html. How? That must have been how the beginning of his original draft read.

Where I see this issue the most is blogs with editors. Look for it the next time you are reading a Wired blog. I’m sorry now that I’ve pointed it out, you likely won’t be able to help but notice, and it will start to bug you too as much as it bothers me

Six Apart is well aware of both issues, and knows the SEO implications. For the second issue, I emailed Anil about this over six months ago, because it bugs me that much.

On the other hand, not only does WordPress not have either of these problems, if you change the URL after publishing, the old URL will continue to work and forward to the new URL.

I’ve done a few exports from TypePad, one of the most recent being Health.com’s blog. One of the things I did was review the existing search engine optimization and I’ve been repeatedly surprised to find scrapper sites some times show up above the blog in search results. My guess is these two issues at least play a part in this happening.

These type of issues are in the most basic examples of SEO. Worse, it’s just a lousy experience — I like to think the first rule of SEO is that the optimization is also a good user experience, or at the very least doesn’t detract from the experience. Come on Six Apart fix these issues. It’s better for everyone.

I whole heartily recommend you try the open source flavor of Movable Type. It is clearly a great product created by fantastic people.

If you are thinking you only have time to try one other blogging software than WordPress, my time and money is on Drupal. People bringing Drupal into the conversation as an alternative has been one of my favorite parts of the discussions. Built on the same PHP stack that powers WordPress and much of the rest of the high performance web. Drupal is the full featured CMS with the heart and minds of the open source communities (I hang out with). Its blogging experience isn’t as polished out of the box as WP or MT, but it’s getting there — and we’re working hard at staying focused and one step ahead of them

If you have time please do share what you love about these other personal publishing environment, particularly if it relates to something that annoys you about WordPress. This way WordPress participants can respond by letting our code do the talking.

If you are currently using WordPress then your highest priority will likely be to plan to take a look at WordPress 2.5 as a release candidate will be coming very soon — watch the WordPress Development blog for the news.

I’m disappointed by Anil’s “upgrade guide”, but not surprised. I used to greatly respect Anil Dash, but in the last year I’ve grown to mostly only respect his abilities. He speaks of sincerity, but I don’t see any other way to interpret the following comments, and other parts of his argument, other than being patronizing and insincere:

I should think that the WP community would be more frustrated with Automattic not having the 2.5 release ready (or even a release date) than with someone pointing out that there are good options for bloggers.

And from the same comment:

And honestly, it may well be that Matt isn’t used to the way that competition works when you’re a well-funded company with tens of millions of dollars in the bank. I know it took us a while to adjust to the reality of how perceptions change in that situation. But given that Automattic’s raised many millions more dollars than Six Apart, I certainly don’t think it’s unfair for us as an underdog to point out our strengths.

The least Anil could do was give us some time to spend some of the money before playing the underdog card.

He is also very passionate in the “upgrade guide” about doing everything first. I’m not really interested, nor do I think most people are, in who did what first. When I get focused on firsts, my friends generously either help escape my nostalgia or my indulgent in the latest fad. I’m reminded to refocus on substance, on how the details come together to create the experience, and what real problems we need to solve together.

Solving problems together is the spirt of open source. I explicitly pointed out that Anil’s post is on the .com blog, because although Six Apart has improved its open source message since I wrote ”

Movable Type 200% Open Source!” Six Apart can be an even greater open source ambassador. As I wrote in the discussion around the 200% article, the lack of open source messaging on movabletype.com is one of the things as an open source evangalist I find disheartening. Looking today I could only find a mention of the Movable Type open source flavor [sic] on movabletype.com down in the Pricing FAQ. I find it awkward then that Anil’s “upgrade guide” talks heavily about open source technologies.

I’m a little upset at Michael Sippey’s response “we’re here to compete” in support of Anil’s “upgrade guide”. I had hoped that Anil had made the mistake of writing such an article on his own. In responded to one part of his article I wrote there:

If you think WordPress is “provided by Automattic”, you don’t understand WordPress and how we and most other open source products operate. WordPress is nothing without the participation of the community.

All those other flavors of Movable Type aren’t open source. As I’ve been discussing with Darren Hoyt regarding Expression Engine:

A popular open source platform ensures maintainability (or transition to another popular open platform) and no vendor lock. Sure, it can be good for your own business to use tools that require specialized knowledge and much fewer people have expertise in but even then having to maintain it may affect your sanity later

Boris Mann, champion of Drupal, and VP of Product Development at Raincity Studios says it even more poignantly:

The “enemy” here is proprietary systems (and those really are quotes around enemy, as I recall having a great discussion with a proprietary Java based system developer this morning at CCI2008). They are not good for business, they are not
good for communities, and they are not good for the growth of this
interlinked web of data that is becoming truly useful.

As Matt wrote in “WordPress is Open Source“, “Movable Type has 8 different licenses and the [open source] one doesn’t allow any support.”

Matt wrote “WordPress is Open Source” partially in response to Movable Type product manager and lead developer Byrne Reese’s comment:

@Sunnduwn – I think that is a question better asked of Automattic. Anil, and certainly not Six Apart, has never been briefed, nor has anyone for that matter been presented with an accounting of what is open and closed source at Automattic.

Byrne you or anyone else just have to ask. Actually, I remember you have asked related questions and I answered you as best as could there.

What we produce that isn’t open source relates to some of the work I’ve quietly (out of the public eye, anyway) long been doing with our hosted solutions. I’m always asking, what isn’t open source and why isn’t it?

Please continue to challenge us here, and challenge us more. Sometimes we won’t answer you as quick as you like or provide the source code as quick as you like, but where we hesitate it is most often to make sure that you don’t have to trudge through some quick hacks, but instead get to benefit from what we learn from them. As Matt says “there is more GPL stuff on the way, as well. ”

I do love the passion of the conversations that are taking place! But please don’t take my, Anil, Michael, or Matt’s passionate words on what is a better solution, we are all incredible biased — I don’t trust myself when it comes to talking about WordPress or the competition.

I remember reading the title of Don Dodge’s post “Vista more secure than Linux, Apple OSX, and Windows XP” and thinking “this ought to be rich”. I did have my problems with the article, and shared my thoughts on it (reading it now, I was a little too intense in my arguments — see what I mean about passion), but I came away really respecting Jeff Jones, Director of Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft [sic].

Here is how Jeff ends his post “Exactly how biased am I?”

Am I biased? I do not think so, but let’s just all keep assuming I am, because I don’t mind. If I make comparisons, I’ll lay out my metrics. I’ll lay out my assumptions. I’ll describe the methodology. Then, if you want to dispute the results, debate the assumptions, or critique the methodology, I’ll ask the same of you. Regardless of the outcome, all sides will get presented, progress is made and that’s a win for interested readers.

That is where Anil’s article fails. His post is one sound bite after another without at least the minimum of links to the technical details. I also got a kick out of how he is motoring along with his “comparision” [sic] with WordPress, and then switches into “A Dashboard That Measures Success”, “Design Matters”, “Get Support Right From The Source”, which I’m not sure are ways MT differentiates itself positively or maybe at all — anyway, his case there is even less clear than the rest of the article.

Jay Allen also wrote “Nothing was said that was untrue about Movable Type or WordPress and, aside from the cheeky title, the post spoke much more to me about the pride and excitement the team has in their new version which they wanted to communicate to the world.”

If the article was about his team’s pride and excitement that would be awesome, but a large part is actually comparisons without context or substance.

But maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe Shelley Powers’ is correct and “Anil’s post was rather funny, and tongue in cheek”. Or just maybe, Anil read and misunderstand “Overcoming Bias: My Favorite Liar”

I’m really glad for Anil’s “upgrade guide”, because it presents to our face some of the Six Apart FUD that potential customers come to us with when considering either WordPress.com VIP hosting or the Automattic Support Network. As I said, it’s a great launching point for more conversations.

Competition is awesome. Most important is having different open source solutions with focus on different problems, or different solutions to the same problems.

It doesn’t really matter what I think. You all know where all our heart and mind lies. I’m most interested in hearing from people still living in a neutral nation, digging in and getting diry with the design decisions and technical details of the real challenges you need to solve, and how well the WordPress experience treats you in response.

Yes, Movable Type Open Source should be celebrated! It is awesome that it already includes everything that was released as Movable Type 4.0 and more. As I understand it there should soon be a stable release. But I am confused by the conversations I read and concerned by the phrases used to describe this “version”.

People ask all the time what is the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. Or they are confused for good reason why they can’t do something they heard about on one or other. But this is a confusion that is easily cleared:

• WordPress.org is open source blogging software that is freely available to download. The software must be downloaded and installed.
• WordPress.com is a web site that hosts blogs free of charge.

After explaining that, people nod their head in understanding, “OK, I get it now”.

I suspect there is little head nodding when it comes to Movable Type branding and open source, although you might think otherwise based on the phrases in these quotes (emphasis mine):

• Six Apart Vice President of Evangelism Anil Dash, “As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source.“
• Tom Keating, “Movable Type has gone 100% open source“
• Jeremy Zawodny, “As a long-time user of Movable Type, I’m glad to see it going fully Open Source now.“
• Mark Jaquith, Movable Type is now Free for any purpose, under the same license used for WordPress“

Based on those quotes, I would think that Movable Type is as open source as [insert funny though vulgar comparison].

Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. There is a Movable Type that isn’t open source. The product Movable Type by itself is reserved for their commercial product , and it sounds like there will be lots of effort to redifferentiate the proprietary product.

Will proprietary Movable Type complete with Movable Type open source? Assuming MT is re-embraced by open source participants, on Six Aparts current path, I think it is inevitable.

No, Cory I think the jury is still out on whether Six Apart is “adopted a [open source] license: because they want to promote freedom”, and that it is ok with me and should be with most everyone else. Movable Type Product Manager Byrne Reese suggests they did it for distribution. Freedom is a spectrum and different freedoms are important to different people, and Six Apart has always demonstrated being awesome in supporting many freedoms!

Saturday, Jan 26th Update: a surprisingly timely release of a stable version of MTOS after my post and this discussion, and updates to the web site, it seems that Byrne and the Six Apart team agree with me at least on some level. Though I don’t like my open source in flavors, I feel comfortable declairing Movable Type only 120% open source now.

Sat, Feb 9th Update: see comment 29 below with some quotes from Six Apart professionals expressing their confusion about Movable Type open source flavor.