Movable Type 4.0 Beta Launches, Platform To Be Open Sourced
SixApart have released a new beta version of popular blogging content management system Movable Type. — Moveable Type 4. is the first major release of Movable Type since MT 3. in 2004 and comes complete with a market disrupting …
Context & Ripple Effects
Movable Type's last big release was MT 3.3 in 2004, and the intervening years belong to its rival: an earlier licensing reversal around MT 3.0 nearly killed the platform and helped fuel WordPress's rise, so SixApart is now answering on both price and product at once — dropping a 4.0 beta and committing to open source the codebase.
The framing matters as much as the license change. Read/WriteWeb and SixApart's own launch notes position MT 4 not as a blog tool but as a broader social media platform, a repositioning the company spells out in its "We're On A Mission" beta post after half a decade of growing from a power-bloggers' tool into enterprise deployments.
First-order effects
- SixApart removes the paid-license objection that has defined the WordPress-versus-MT comparison since the 3.x era, letting developers inspect and modify the source while existing enterprise users finally get a major upgrade after a three-year gap.
- Power bloggers and corporate adopters evaluating platforms can now test MT 4's expanded feature set immediately rather than waiting for a final release.
Second-order effects
- WordPress loses its default answer to "why pay for Movable Type?" — the competitive question shifts from licensing cost to which platform better serves community and multi-author sites, forcing feature-for-feature comparison instead of price comparison.
- An open-sourced MT invites outside contributors into what was a closed SixApart development process, putting pressure on the company to run a genuine community project or cede the openness argument back to WordPress.
Third-order effects
- Blogging software is consolidating around an open-core pattern — free, open-source core products monetized through services and enterprise support — making proprietary per-seat licensing untenable for standalone CMS vendors.
- If MT 4 succeeds as a social media platform rather than a blogging tool, category boundaries between blog software, community platforms, and content management systems blur, pushing vendors to compete on ecosystem breadth.
The trend: Publishing platforms are abandoning per-license pricing for open-source distribution to survive against free rivals, betting that community contribution and services revenue replace license fees.