Last month at Le Web 3 in Paris, Six Apart released the first version of Movable Type Open Source (MTOS).  After a number of weeks in beta they released the first stable version yesterday.   MTOS 4.1 can be downloaded at MovableType.org.

MTOS is a separate, open source version of Movable Type. It’s licensed under the GNU
General Public License (GPL) version 2. Importantly, in a recent
statement, the company asserts that “MTOS has every feature in Movable
Type 4.0 along with several new minor improvements and bug fixes.”

I sat in on a Six Apart ProNet conference call in December hosted by Byrne Reese, MT Product Manager.  When asked about performance of the MT 4.1 releases his response was as follows:

“All aspects of performance are a priority to every member of the MT team.  By company directive every release will have performance enhancements in it.  No release will ever be slower than any previous.”

In todays “hurry up and ship” mode of software development this kind of direction is welcome news.  Lets hope they live up to it.

You may notice this blog is powered by MT 4.0.  So far it fits my purpose and have no plans to upgrade anytime in the near future.  I have recently investigated Drupal, Joomla and WordPress as options to move to.  The support for templates is extremely limited in MT as compared to others I listed.  I will hold out for a few months and see how popular MTOS becomes.  Hopefully we’ll see the creation of  communities for MT like the Joomla template site, Joomlart.com.

On a side note today marks the release of this sites new branding and design.  There are still some small items I need to take care of like adding a blog roll and minor design tweeks.  Let me know what you think of it so far.