Movable Type Open Source

Movable Type went open source yesterday, and I don’t care. Too little, too late. A long time ago, it seemed like MT was the way to put together a blog. It was free for personal use, it was good, it was used by heavyweights of blogging. But I could never get past two things: the first was the fact that the license was not actually open source, not a BSD license, not a GPL license, just “you can use it and it’s free.” Well, I did use it at one job I had many years ago, giving a set of internal developers blogs to keep track of their stuff. I also experimented with installs over the years, but for this blog I went with Blogger initially, and eventually, in 2004, I went with WordPress. The second thing I could not get over was the way comments were handled in MT. I have no idea if it’s still the case that commenting in MT spawns new processes for the Perl interpreter with each comment, but I do know that messages like this one, with people complaining about the performance of MT, are nothing new. Meanwhile, WordPress has superseded MT as the blogging software of choice. It’s not without problems, but the license makes it completely hackable, and I can modify and redistribute whatever hacks I make as much as possible.

Something that’s been important to me since I started blogging was that my site would be portable, forever and ever. Anything with a restrictive license or that puts me in a position to be beholden forever is a nonstarter. I use flickr, sure, but there are options to export everything from flickr, which I take advantage of. I think it’s time to think about a mechanism to export entries from twitter, too. Despite it being so ephemeral, I’d like to capture that stuff too and move it out should I choose to.