On The Road Forward
It’s been over a month since my last post here and I need to break the silence. The run up to the holidays and then the clean-up coming out the other side got the better of my time and attention. And, as welcome as it was, the release of MTOS (the MT core under a GPL license) and the first beta of MT 4.1 complicated things.
Not that I don’t have a lot to say. I actually wanted to say something smart and interesting about the announcement when it happened a month ago, but it never happened. If you missed the news you can read about it here:
- Boing Boing: Movable Type now under a free license
- CMSWire: Movable Type Goes Open Source; Released Today
MT has been free for personal use and open (readable by anyone) source for some time, but releasing the core under the GPL opens a whole new dimension of where MT can go. The GPL doesn’t just mean free, but freedom for anyone to do a lot more with the system. The value of that freedom will take some time to ferment for end users into something palpable, but eventually it will happen and the community will be better for it.
Some of the earliest community work being discussed on the mtos-dev list is the creation of Debian and RPM distributions. An extremely geeky, but useful development that will make adoption easier then ever.
Being a Perl coder and advocate of open source, the release of MTOS has great significance to me personally.
The most significant is the potential for collaboration amongst a larger body of talented resources and varied experiences. I cherished tenant of open source development is “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Open source is not just about fixing bugs, but solving problems and addressing user needs. Bill Joy said it best when he stated “Wherever you work, most of the smart people are somewhere else.” I’ve always thought that was the case of the MT community and I would suspect Six Apart would agree with me.
That’s great because I think the MT community could use some fresh blood — not that I don’t find the Six Apart staff and MT developer brethren a fascinating and interesting lot.
There is a lot more I could say and probably will on this blog or one of the MT related mailing lists. For now I’ll just close with some links and encourage you to get involved.
- Contributing to MTOS
- Downloading MTOS
- MTOS Nightly Builds
- Public Subversion Repository
- MTOS Mailing Lists
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