Movable Type is now open source

I had a look at the source way back before they went commercial, and it made my eyes bleed. Trying to modify it gave me a cranial hernia. I moved to WordPress because, even though PHP is the Visual Basic of teh Interblag, it still doesn't hurt as much.

And I like Perl! Imagine how it must be for people who only use it because they have to!

that MTOS has every feature in Movable Type 4.0, which I think is a change.

It is though it was mentioned by the company a few months back after 6A took in the feedback they where getting from the initial announcement.

It'll be interesting to see if/how this changes Movable Type's share in the blogging community,

It will indeed be interesting though "blogging community" is kind of amorphous and depends on who you ask and in what context. If blogging community means anyone who blogs then Blogspot and probably even MySpace and Facebook have more users then WP or MT. If you mean people who blog about blogging tools then yes, WP gets more talk.

Thought I've never did an official survey, I think more uber blogs like Boing Boing and Huffington Post are running MT then any other blogging tool and I don't see them switching.

I also might go and take a look at the source, which I've never examined because I knew there was no reason to.

Please do!

I've been pretty much a lone voice in the MT community about coding style and code quality. There definitely where some issues over the years in terms of code quality that are being addressed. It's improved though there is still a long way to go.

When I've raised the issues pre-GPL Six Apart has always politely explained that those issues, while a consideration to the product's development, where secondary because they didn't matter to users/customers. I never quite agreed with this being a developer, but I understood where they were coming from.

All that changes with the MT core being developed under a GPL license and in an open way.

What is needed are experienced Perl coders to join the mtos-dev mailing list and start discussing those issues making suggestions.

I don't think MTOS will attract the large body of relatively clueless people who want to set up blogging for themselves on their own servers; they're mostly already lost to WordPress, which is sad.

Where it may become much more popular is with people onselling or packaging blogging services, or managing multiple blogs for an organisation.