I’ve seen my share of premium themes online, and from the looks of it, this is definitely worth the price. Most go for $75-100, and they’re not nearly as good as this one.

Six Apart just announced on the official Movable Type blog, that their blogging software is finally open source, with the launch of version 4. It started initially as open source, became commercial with the launch of version 3, and now, finally is open source again.

They probably arrived to the conclusion that they lost the blogging software battle, with WordPress strongly dominating this market. I think it was a huge mistake making the software commercial, as this opened the road for WordPress to dominate. Six Apart dropped the ball and lost the dominance that they once had with that move. It will be interesting to see if they manage to get back on top. I doubt it though. The number of plugins and themes that come with WordPress right now is huge, and you just don’t have the same freedom of movement with Movable Type.

If they manage to form a strong community behind this software, they might take back a good chunk of the market, but the number one place is really out of their reach by now. Not in the next few years anyway.

Highlights from Movable Type Open Source:

• MTOS has every feature in Movable Type 4.0 along with several new minor improvements and bug fixes.
• All plugins, themes, templates, designs, and APIs that work with MT4 work with MTOS. MTOS also works with other Six Apart open source technologies such as memcached.
• MTOS is one of the only open source blogging tools with built-in support for an unlimited number of blogs, an unlimited number of authors, and sign-in with OpenID, with no plugins needed.
• We’ll be adding additional paid benefits for people who’ve paid for commercial licenses for Movable Type, with benefits like improved technical support and custom add-ons such as plugins or themes.
• MTOS is complemented by the paid software products we sell on top of the MT platform, such as our Enterprise Solution, Community Solution and personal and commercial licenses which include support.
• There’s a public Subversion repository for getting the MTOS code and nightly builds.
• Once there are stable public builds, those downloads will be on movabletype.org as well.
• You can find out how to contribute to the MTOS project and the MT community at movabletype.org.
• MTOS support is provided by other members of the community. (A great place to start is the new Movable Type Wiki.) You can buy a standard paid license for one of the existing Movable Type products if you’d like professional support directly from Six Apart.
• Movable Type Open Source is being released under the standard GPL license.
• We welcome and encourage the distribution and reuse of all or part of MTOS in other open source projects. Get in touch if you want to work together.

Relevant links:

• Movable Type Open Source
• Download MTOS