I was quite unprepared to hear that the Movable Type has announced the Movable Type Open Source Project today. On the very same day as the announcement of the new beta of the Movable Type, they have announced that in a short time, after releasing the final version of the 4th Movable Type, they are going to release an open source version available for everyone for any use, including commercial one. Until now, the available for a free download version of a Movable Type is free only for the non-commercial use, which strictly limits the potential users of this blogging platform.
For me personally, this makes the Movable Type much more interesting for experiments and eventual use. Without making a clear free open source competition there is no way of appearing to the mass market, and i think that every company has already understood it – the best examples are Oracle and Microsoft with their Oracle XE and SQL Server Express Edition and, smile, IBM with a free version of a DB2, which is just a kind of a recognition, of the situation when the starter and independent developer markets are completely occupied by MySQL, for just one simple reason – it is free.
I am not going to wait until the release of the new open-source Movable Type to see if its really worth, but tomorrow is going to download the personal version and experiment a little bit with it, the same thing i recommend to everyone working with the web.