Using GPL differently: WordPress and MovableType Open Source
Earlier this summer, the folks at Six Apart announced the formation of an open source project around the Movable Type blogging platform (see my post on OpenParenthesis and Sebastian’s on blog.wohlrapp.com).
There’s been a fair amount of anticipation surrounding the project, since Movable Type was an early an important platform for users hosting their own blogs, and it seemed that a GPL’d version of that platform would be a potentially strong competitor to WordPress and Roller for anyone interested in an open source blog platform. (The launch date for the OpenSource version is still said to be Q3 of 2007 - which ought to be quite soon).
Recently, Mark on WordPress (”What a GPL’d Movable Type Means for WordPress“) pointed out a key difference between WordPress and MTOS (and not just that Movable Type is two words while WordPress is just one, though that seems hard enough for me to remember - you’d think the fact that the company name is Six Apart should be enough to remind me).
Although both WordPress and MTOS are/will be released under the GPL (v2 presumably, though Six Apart hasn’t said for certain), Six Apart’s Open Source Contribution Policy will require contributors to assign copyright to Six Apart for anything they contribute, in order to preserve their ability to dual license the application.
Mark argues this will potentially be a significant weakness in comparison to WordPress’ policy, in which copyright remains with the contributor:
The interesting ramification of this is that while code can flow from MTOS to WordPress, Six Apart can’t allow WordPress code (or code from any other GPL’d project) to end up in MTOS, unless it gets the author (or authors) of that code to sign over copyright of the code to Six Apart.
He further notes that the sole-ownership model could permit Six Apart to effectively close the project at some later date:
Note that this also allows Six Apart at any time in the future to say “As of today, we are no longer releasing a GPL version of Movable Type.” And that would require that someone fork the code in order to proceed with development. WordPress can’t easily do that, as it is not owned by a single legal entity
Ultimately, it seems highly unlikely Six Apart would go to the trouble of establishing the MTOS project and its governance structures just in order to bring it “in house” again. The policy is also not that unusual: a number of significant open source projects (MySQL, for example - see the MySQL Contributor License Agreement) require similar assignment of copyright and for similar reasons. Others, like Alfresco, use a contribution agreement (pdf) which explicitly gives Alfresco the right to use contributed code under any number of future licenses, including binary or proprietary ones - preserving the same flexibility without requiring copyright assignment.
Finally, it is important to remember that the value of an open source project and the community around it is not measured purely in terms of the number of contributors or contributions: access to source code enables customization to a level not possible in closed source projects, and communities also provide product development insight, documentation, bug reports, and other less tangible assets in addition to code.
Developers won’t avoid Movable Type and flock to WordPress based purely on these kinds of licensing distinctions. It will be interesting, however, to see what kind of community arises around MTOS and what kinds of contributions they receive. That will depend partially on how the community is managed (how open Six Apart is about interacting with those outside the company) but also largely on the core architecture and features of the project itself.
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