Code / Appnel Solutions 

MTOS Progress: Moving Forward Though More Slowly Then Anticipated

Earlier today on the ProNet mailing list, MT Product Manager Byrne Reese posted this update about the Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) project:

I wanted to give everyone a quick update about the MTOS project. We are still committed to getting it released this year. We are behind schedule we know, but getting all the resources in place was more complicated then I had anticipated.

But, we are making progress on the biggest prerequisite for launch: all the infrastructure to support the project.

• FogBugz has been selected to be our bug tracking system, which is awesome. The hardware is getting setup today and the software should be installed tomorrow.

• The ops team is also looking to expand the capacity of code.sixapart.com where MTOS’s svn repos will live.

• Brad is working on code segmentation and organization for our push of our latest MT code out to a public svn.

Anyways - just in case people were wondering. :)

It’s good to know this effort hasn’t fallen by the way side after all the buzz it generated over the summer. I’m just want it to start already.

While precisely what MTOS will be has not been defined, we do it will not just be MT 4 with a GPL license.

Other questions remain. How community feedback and submissions will be worked in. (This does not refer to licensing and copyright issues that are separate and have been terrible overblown.) To put it mildly, communication and collaboration, particularly when it comes to development and deployment issues, has historically been a real company shortcoming for Six Apart. While there has been a great deal of improvement lately with product and marketing communication, engineering is still generally inaccessible and absent from the community. A big leap forward is going to be necessary in order to handle the open community aspect of an open source project especially given the untrusting cynical detractors the company has in the open source community.

Besides the continual refinement and modularization of the code base, my hope is that MTOS will spawn other related subprojects where the major components that make up the MTOS core are available as separate pieces that can be more easily incorporated into other projects with forking. I see this as being similar to how Mozilla operates where things like the rendering, interface and scripting engines are available as separate components. The object database layer is already in CPAN. A close cousin of the base application framework also exists in CPAN also. I tried to force the issue and get the template engine down a similar path though will little success so far.

Time will tell.