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. Weiterlesen →

We have been busy adding new functionalities to EOS. The latest addition is the “propose a project” feature. This now gives our users the possibility to propose candidates for the directory. Each proposed project will go through our standard process to receive the necessary information and the ratings. Our objective is to include projects that are relevant to enterprises and mature for enterprise usage. We try to keep the directory balanced in terms of granularity of the individual components. Currently we do have 294 projects listed and a significant number on the waiting list.

After listening carefully to feedback from our user group we decided to change the rating procedure. We are currently implementing a new approach that will be launched soon. In our next version users will have to authenticate themselves (and therefore register before if they haven’t done so yet – it’s the same procedure as for the forums) – before they can rate. – To complement the rating people will receive both a feedback on what the rating actually means and the possibility to enter a comment to support their rating. With this we hope to receive valuable additional insights into usage experience and more objective rating input. We are interested of course to receive feedback from the user community on whether they like this new approach or not of course. The changes should be online in a few days.

Ross Mayfield argues that it is “Time for Web 2.0 to be Unleashed with Open Source.”According to Ross:

Web 2.0 companies are largely built upon Open Source software. But how many of them do you consider significant contributors to Open Source? In general, there is an open ethic, and communities demand (and reward) it. But somewhere along the way, the focus shifted to APIs and Open Source wasn’t rationalized as part of the business model. Some call them Open APIs or Open Data, but until there is a legal framework adhered to as community standard (word is OSI will work to address this), they are just APIs with unilateral rights. And with the focus on APIs, instead of contributing code back to the projects you leverage, or contributing your own projects, cooperation has been limited (save a handful of great standards efforts like Atom) Business models have also been held back by the gradual evolution of Open Source licensing, until now.

Until, that is, the OSI approved the Common Public Attribution License.While I’m not convinced personally that this change (availability of an additional license option) will single-handedly bring about a shift such as the one Ross describes, it will undoubtedly make possible additional innovation in the software-as-a-service arena, and hopefully will broaden the set of enterprises who feel comfortable opening (portions of) their codebases.I’d love to see new social network platforms and applications, for example, take the step of making not only their APIs but their codebases available.I’m reminded of the contrast (which I’ve blogged about elsewhere) during the O’Reilly Executive Briefing at this year’s OSCON between the Mozilla Firefox extension development platform and the Facebook API: how much richer the context was for Firefox plugin developers, and how controlled and limited the environment is for Facebook API developers.Mozilla didn’t need the CPAL to enable such openness, but maybe other projects will feel that they can now release code they would otherwise have held private.

Good panel discussion from OSCON about the Art of Community moderated by Danese Cooper, with (left-to-right):

• Jimmy Wales
• Dawn Foster
• Sulamita Garcia
• Whurley
• Karl Fogel
• Brian Behlendorf