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Movable Type released under the GPL
Back in 2004, LWN covered the fuss surrounding a license change for Movable Type which had the effect of requiring payments from many site operators. Our point at the time was that this software had never been made available as free software, so that kind of change was always a possibility. No longer: Movable Type is now available under GPLv2. "Like many of us on the team, some of you have been waiting for this moment for years. For a business, an open source license affects boring things like how a product is created, updated, and distributed. But the open source movement has always been about something more important: Freedom."
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Movable Type released under the GPL Posted Dec 13, 2007 17:55 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] I wonder if we're witnessing the disintegration of Six Apart. They sold off LiveJournal, the LiveJournal founder decamped for Google, and now they GPL'd Movable Type. When a company slaps the GPL on existing code it seems like it's frequently followed by the disappearance or at least the severe impairment of that company.
Movable Type released under the GPL Posted Dec 13, 2007 19:37 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] You mean, like Trolltech, or Sun, for example?
Movable Type released under the GPL Posted Dec 13, 2007 21:57 UTC (Thu) by and (subscriber, #2883) [Link] > You mean, like Trolltech, or Sun, for example? I guess more like 4Front's OSS, as well as SSH, PGP and (arguably) Solaris. These all share one characteristic: As long as they provided any value over the free software equivalents were proprietary and when they were freed it was already they where hardly relevant anymore... Of course there are other projects which evited this fate: Qt and Java are probably most prominent. For Qt and Java there where projects under heavy development which had the potential to make the originals irrelevant, both called harmony.
Movable Type released under the GPL Posted Dec 14, 2007 0:55 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (guest, #1698) [Link] I wouldn't write off Solaris yet. IMNSHO, 4Front OSS failed as a commercial product not because the code was GPL'd, but because their business model was to sell more advanced versions as proprietary code. That gave people more incentive to use ALSA.
Movable Type released under the GPL Posted Dec 20, 2007 19:01 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] Which arguably spoiled things for everybody. :(
Movable Type released under the GPL Posted Dec 20, 2007 19:29 UTC (Thu) by brouhaha (guest, #1698) [Link] I don't think it "spoiled things" for anyone, except perhaps the owners of OSS. End users got ALSA, which is substantially better than OSS.There are certainly opportunities to sell GPL'd code. Red Hat is an obvious example. But it's also possible to sell commercial non-GPL licenses to GPL code, if you're the owner of the code. I've done that myself. What I don't think tends to work very well is the bait-and-switch "You can use this version under the GPL, or pay us for a better version" model. If that's tried for anything that's even vaguely popular, it just inspires people to fork the code and add the features themselves. While many people seem not to like the idea of forking development, that's actually one of the great advantages of free software. You're not locked in to getting updates from a single source.
Movable Type released under the GPL Posted Dec 21, 2007 19:51 UTC (Fri) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] > End users got ALSA, which is substantially better than OSS. That's what I was referring to; I must respectfully disagree about the relative merits of the two systems.
Movable Type released under the GPL Posted Dec 14, 2007 14:13 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Last I checked, SSH was alive and well; they went the opposite route: ssh was open source for Unix, and is now closed source. What is open source is OpenSSH, an ofshot off the last open-source SSH by the OpenBSD crowd. AFAIU, PGP was always intended as open source, just in the software-patent blessed US it had to be commercial.
Movable Type released under the GPL Posted Dec 14, 2007 16:06 UTC (Fri) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link] Looks like submitted code must have copyright transferred to Six Apart: http://www.movabletype.org/opensource/mtos_contribution_a... In any case I'm glad they decided to release MT. I used it back when it was freeware, then migrated over to WordPress when MT was locked down. Since WordPress never got around to supporting multiple blogs with a single install, I ended up having to run/update 3-4 instances of WP, and with their recent habit of having a CRITICAL SECURITY UPDATE every month or two, this has gotten to be a real hassle.
Movable Type released under the GPL Posted Dec 20, 2007 3:30 UTC (Thu) by Burgundavia (guest, #25172) [Link] Wordpress MU?. Aside from running wordpress.com, I know it runs blogs.gnome.org and a few other such sites.
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