Open Source Movable Type and Community Rebirth

I've been using Movable Type for years now, and I signed up for Sixapart's Typepad service within a month of it's availability.  Lately, I had contemplated moving off of Movable Type.  It just wasn't serving me for blog community projects like the Learning Remix.  Web sites in general, and blogs in particular, really only have value inasmuch as they are connected to other web sites.

So, I'm glad to see Sixapart making two moves.  First, they are making a big step toward supporting community features out of the box with Movable Type 4.  Second, and much more importantly, they are open sourcing the product using this updated code base.  It's hard to imagine the company was making money off of selling Movable Type licenses alone (see this comment by Anil Dash suggesting that the real money is in services).  Open sourcing the product will both make it more valuable for Sixapart by widening the developer base and more valuable for the community that will be freely able to modify this code base to its own ends.  Like Sixapart, much of the community around this product makes it money off of providing services, and the closed source model just was not serving them.

As I noted in a recent comment to a post by Byrne Reese, Movable Type's product manager:

I agree. I've seen the knowledge content of the community resources shoot way up, and that's what was needed. The constant decline was depressing.

I'd like to see a post where you identified what parts of MT 4 are actually in production at 6A. It seems like MT was the initial basis for a lot of the services 6A started (like Typepad where I begain using it within a month of it launching) but then the codebase for the products started to diverge rapidly.

The reason I ask this question is that it seems you are creating the basis for an ecosystem where 6A and the community mutually reinforce each other. My guess is that you'll look back on this time and see it as the point where close sourced MT stopped being a drag on the company and open source MT started being a contributor.

Your business is a service business, not a packaged software distribution business.

I suspect that making this transition will be hard because people will have to adapt to a new business model, but I really do think it will be worth it.