Six Apart, the developers of the popular, blogging-application Movable Type, are developing an open source version of Movable Type alongside their commercial offering.

Why go open source, especially if there will still be a commercial version?

“It’s simple: our customers and our community have asked for an open source version of Movable Type. Many customers and developers in the Movable Type community were looking for a version of Movable Type that they were free to modify for their own needs. Additionally, there are community members who are looking to bundle an open source distribution of Movable Type with other open source products. We have been considering this option for some time but decided to base MTOS on the MT4 line, which is why this announcement coincides with MT4.”

This week they launched a website to support the Movable Type Open Source Project (or MTOS Project) and the first open source distribution should be available for download in late summer.

Movable Type is written in Perl, which is not something I usually blog, but I think it’s interesting to watch companies adopt open source as part of their commercial strategy.

Update: Carthik Sharma made an interesting post on this announcement from the WordPress perspective. (WordPress is Movable Type’s competitor.) Sharma thinks it may be an attempt to pull back customers who have switched to free and open source tools and that it may be too little, too late.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 11:26 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.