I would love to get the community discussing other open source projects, how they operate, the mechanics of them and how the MTOS project can learn from best practices of engaging a community of developers and users around the product. What works, and what doesn't?
I would be interested in know if development on Movable Type will be ceased or cut back once it becomes open source. I have heard that this is the plan.
This is absolutely not the case. There has never been a bigger team working on MT in the history of the product, and we're actively looking for more engineers, so if you know anyone, please -- pass them our way.
Ian, I'm curious, where have you heard this rumor? Got any links? I follow nearly every mention of Movable Type or Six Apart anywhere online or in many popular mailing lists, and have somehow never once heard even a mistaken assertion like this -- your help in tracking down where this kind of misinformation comes from would be fantastic.
Iann - are you lobbing us a soft ball? You sly dog!!
I actually have something useful to contribute to this topic. Today I tried downloading the current "community version" of MySQL. The process of getting there was a nightmare, requiring something like eight billion clicks, and several times I was solicited to buy the commercial version, even though it should have been obvious I was not someone who was looking to buy a database. So we should always make the download process for MTOS vs. the commercial version very clear, and as easy as possible for both paths.
Hi, I am here!
Open Source Projects that are 'successful' defined by 'best practice' and 'community' would be Joomla, Wordpress and osCommerce.
The latter has probably been promoting an active community since the early days it was the first ever project I became involved with and sharing your contribution with fellow users is a very powerful motivator if it's done well. By this I mean feeling you can contribute in the first place, I had never used PHP and 'hacked' the code to create something that worked and then uploaded it and it amazed me how people took my effort and cleaned & polished it, I was given pointers and help which again make you want to get more involved.