Movable Type Open Source and WordPress
Sep 16
According to Mark Jaquith, Six Apart recently announced their move to release Movable Type’s source code under the GNU General Public License, exactly what beloved WordPress is under.
Something notable about this move is that since Six Apart is still the sole operator of MT, contributions made to its source code by anyone can only be made on condition that the individual assign all copyright of the code to SA. EDIT [8/18]: While code that works in Movable Type may be adapted to WordPress, due to the way the GPL works SA has chosen not to let the other way round happen unless, as mentioned, the coder attributes all rights to SA. Thanks to Byrne Reese for pointing out my mistake.
This is because the GPL is a ‘viral’ license. If the code’s copyright remains with the individual, and/or licensed under the GPL, SA can’t release the other version of MT without having to worry about violating the license’s terms. Basically, if any part of a program is GPL’d, the rest of it has to be GPL’d, along with all derivatives and such. For a company like SA, that’s gotta be hard.
A quick correction and clarification, and I think this has to do with your use of the word “port” more then anything else.
Legally speaking a “port” would be original work because it would constitute someone reimplementing a feature in a different language. Therefore MTOS would be free to use it if they got the proper assignment from the author(s) of that port. In this way both products are actually free to draw inspiration of one another. Something I hope increases with the release of MTOS.
What would be against our contribution policy would be the lifting (verbatim) of source code from WordPress and including it in Movable Type, for exactly the reasons you specify: there would be no way for Six Apart to reasonably acquire a license or assignment from all the possible contributors of that piece of code.
Then again the probability of us even being able to lift code directly from WordPress is quite small given that the two pieces of software are written in different languages.
Byrne Reese
on September 18, 2007 at 5:06 am.
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@Byrne:
Oh yes, right. Apologies for that mistake, I have just rewritten the statement so it makes better sense and resolves ambiguities.
It also *just* slipped my mind that Movable Type is written in Perl, so I agree, that really wouldn’t be so feasible :/
BoltClock
on September 18, 2007 at 4:09 pm.
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