Six Apart's UFO?

[stewardess]

slashbluegreen may have found the Unidentified Financial Opportunity that a bunch of us suspected drove Six Apart's panic.

Moveable Type 4.0 is the first major release of Movable Type since MT 3.0 in 2004 and comes complete with a market disrupting announcement: SixApart will open source Movable Type before the end of the third quarter.It was announced June 5th

Comments

[nebris]

Ah, ha! And I've come to hate Anil Dash. lol

~M~

[stewardess]

I've come to hate Anil Dash.

Can you give me some reasons to? *g* I know he tried to do damage control around the time of the purge, but I didn't look closely at his statements then [at a non-LJ site] because I didn't know then he was management. I need to find what he said and incorporate it into my clusterfuck tale [though as I recall he was out of the loop and just blathering.]

[bunnysquee]

i have no idea what that means ...

[almostnever]

Six Apart started out with a piece of free blogging software called Movable Type. It was the standard in blog software at the time.

In 2004, they started charging for MT. They made money, but they lost a lot of the users and developers who had provided free support in their forums, and free extensions to the software. MT has been losing market share to other free blog software packages ever since.

Six Apart then offered hosted prefab blogs powered by a version of MT on Typepad, and I suspect that's their real moneymaker.

Now MT is coming out with a bigger, better version that's going to be free again, and open source. The users who provide free support might come back. The programmers who extend the functionality for free might come back. MT could become the king of the blogging hill again.

If MT becomes the blog software standard again, 6A stands to make a lot of money selling support for the open source version of MT. Though considering the support I've seen on 6A properties, I don't think it's something I'd personally pay for

[stewardess]

Thanks. That answered a question of mine: how could it be a business application? I didn't know they sold MT as a "turn key" product to other companies.

*shudders at the term "turn key" for a while*

I'm still confused by the licensing murkiness. It seems creepy to go open-source, get all that free development, and then decide what you are going to charge. But perhaps that's a common practice.

[almostnever]

They weren't open source originally, they just made the software transparent enough that it was easy for developers to create plugins and extensions.

And there was always a free version of MT throughout all their licensing, it's just that version 3 limited what the free version could do by a lot. It particularly upset a lot of people because at that time, spammers had figured out how to besiege MT blogs with comment spam, and 6A of course put antispam protection into the pay versions of MT and not so much in the free version. So even though there was nominally a free version of MT, in reality, comment spam was such a big problem that it was pretty much a case of pay up, or switch.

Later after all the complaints, 6A made MT free for personal users again, but by then a lot of people had migrated to WordPress and other blogging solutions.

[blade_girl]

I'm not clear on exactly why this is a big financial opportunity for SA. I get that it's a release of a software upgrade, but how does the open-sourcing figure into it as a big moneymaker?

[oulangi]

My guess would be this:

The new licensing model once MT 4 is opened source will be similar to MySQL, the paid version will include technical and product support from SixApart

[stewardess]

Yes. I didn't see the advantages of it until I read that bit, too.

[kencf0618]

Very I. F. Stone.

[stewardess]

Muckraking is a beautiful thing.