Melody is a new WordPress competitor — bring it!

Based on Movable Type Open Source (MTOS), Byrne Reese writes “[the project's] focus initially is consciously not about features, but rather upon laying the groundwork through a well-documented set of processes by which future features and contributions can be made.” to live up to it’s tag line “Community Powered Publishing”.

The tag line seems to directly take aim at Movable Type for not being community powered, though in interview Byrne suggests that may be part of the overhead of Movable Type being an enterprise product.

From my position looking over the fence, I’m sympathetic to how the Movable Type community has suffered since “in 2008 [when] the hyper dedicated Movable Type product manager, Byrne Reese, was laid off from Six Apart”. Sure, the MT community isn’t just that one person, but he sure was a catalyst and one of the only open channels to the inners of Six Apart. Since then there doesn’t seem to have been anyone there for the developer community, or for me, as a member of another project, to collaborate with. Even Byrne’s own recent email to the MTOS-dev list asking “Who is the lead engineer of MTOS?” went unanswered. Here is that email:

“I hate to ask such a seemingly odd question, but I have recently had questions I wanted to address to the lead engineer of MTOS — offlist, but am honestly not sure who that might be right now. Who is the best person to address questions about governance and process to? Is there one?”

Mark Carey writes today on mt-hacks.com:

“Over two years ago, Six Apart, the creator of Movable Type open sourced the code for the core Movable Type application. While its was an exciting and bold move, the announcement and product naming choices were confusing to many — the differences between Movable Type Open Source and the Movable Type Commercial product and closed source add-ons sold by Six Apart weren’t easy to grasp, and some even disputed the newly open source nature of core application.”

Although Six Apart promised that they would  continue “fighting for openness” when they announced “Open Source Movable Type ” at the end of 2007, Melody is now the hope for a Movable Type-based openly developed product. The Open Melody FAQs includes:

“The community created Melody out a shared passion for Movable Type and a shared desire to see it flourish as a platform. We felt that the best and quickest way to achieve that goal was to create a product in which the community was inherently entrusted with a greater degree of control over its direction, communication channels and roadmap, and rewarded with more transparency and a greater sense of belonging.”

Serdar Yegulalp writes “To see a new way for the same framework to be improved, and to allow for feedback and suggestions that stem from my own use, is deeply heartening”

I’m very interested to see how the source code flows. The greatest gift of open source isn’t the right to fork, but the ability to merge.

Wih founding members and leadership including the likes of Byrne, Tim Appnel, Jay Allen , and Jesse Gardner, Open Melody is off to an incredible start. ((By incorporating as a US non-profit there commitment is beyond doubt — if only in surviving the painful process that the WordPress Foundation has recently come out the other end of.)) The web site looks great, and they’ve chosen open and friendly development tools.

What is good for blogging and open source is good for WordPress, and Melody seems very good for both:

• I’m eager to put my frustrations trying to collaborate with the often opaque Six Apart behind me, and collaborate through the Open Melody conduit.
• I can’t wait to see a leaner, more modular open source MT based product emerges that is also more feature rich — further confirmation of WordPress’s own approaches, and more good open source products are great for open source.

If you love blogging or open source, then Melody needs our love, participate! (hence this post)

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.

This is good news for all bloggers. Someday soon trackbacks can be retired.

The greatest reason why this is good news is because pingbacks, unlike trackbacks, require us to do nothing. Trackbacks require you to copy and paste a special URL

As he suggests, “[pingback] is marginally less spammy than TrackBack”, but he has the greatest reason wrong. The reason why it is as implimented in in WordPress is because WordPress follows the “MAY requirement” — he has you there — of confirming that the link exists in the article that pung.

Regardless of how “many WordPress blogs out there, it would be a disservice to Movable Type users not to”. If you are using some other blogging platform that doesn’t automattically linkback articles using pinkback, ask them to end the madness (or give us something even better)of an experience that unnecessarily requires your work, trackback.

TrackBack is pretty broken as it stands today. The discovery mechanism is god-awful, and the protocol is prone to exploitation and spam. Generally speaking, given the percentage of TrackBacks that are spam, it makes me wonder why bother at all.

If you are a software developer I highly recommend you read the whole article, because it sounds like he is describing some problems with pingbacks and the opportunity for an even better linkback technology.

Mon, Feb 11 Update: Byrne explains that I was mistaken and that Trackback does have an autodiscover mechanism. Long before getting involved in WordPress someone explained it to me that those are the reason you see a special URL in Movable Type blogs was so you could copy and paste it and use it to link your article to that article’s comments, and I never questioned it.

This discussion leads me to the conclusion that there is no reason to include a “Trackback URL” visually in the viewers experience.

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.