Like the Frank Zappa album title suggests, ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch, it may be this latest move by SixApart to create a MovableType Open Source project comes too late to recapture lost users or even impress new ones. I find it very intriguing that MovableType feels the need, three years after that licensing gaffe in the spring of 2004, to follow in the footsteps of WordPress. It begs the question how far would WP have come had it not been for this marketing ploy of MT .. which turned out to be the biggest boon to WP’s success! Matt Mullenweg should kiss the ground Mena and Ben walk on for that.

True, blogging has changed a lot from its early days, when the only choices were LiveJournal, Blogger, Greymatter and MovableType, which back in 2002, was the darling of bloggers. I stuck with it through version 2.64. When MT3 came onto the scene, I hightailed it for WordPress country where I’ve been ever since.

But you have to wonder, as do quite a few other folks around the Net, why open source and why now? As Carthik pointed out, the SixApart blog sheds little or no light on the reasoning. Perhaps we’ll just have to meet back here in three years to compare notes. I predict WordPress (or some form of it) will still be the blog application of choice. And meanwhile, I’ll head over to movabletype.org and download the beta version of MT4. Just because I can.