Movable Type goes virtual with JumpBox

Six Apart announced this week that it is partnering with virtual-appliance vendor JumpBox to deliver a virtualized instance of Movable Type, its open-source blogging platform. No more configuration problems as your organization strives to get up and blogging.

Ed Anuff, executive vice president and general manager of the Movable Type division of Six Apart, declared:

You can get up and running immediately, while reducing the cost of configuration and maintenance. And it's a snap for anyone who wants to evaluate the platform to get started, whether that's on a desktop, running VMWare or Parallels, a large-scale deployment on Amazon's EC2, or anything in between.

What does it cost? If you're a developer or blogger, it's free. If you're a corporate type, Virtual Movable Type Pro can be had for $449.95 for five users and $1,549.95 for 20 users. Not bad, especially when you remove the cost of futzing around with configuration files, often a significant cost in any enterprise software acquisition.

As a backstory to the announcement, I'm willing to bet that the open-source nature of Movable Type made it much easier on the JumpBox folks to get the appliance right. Just one of the many benefits that open source affords.

[anildash]

Matt, thanks for the coverage. And your closing idea is exactly right -- this is the sort of initiative we'd been excited about doing as part of our commitment to releasing Movable Type under an open source license. We did an open license because we believe in the principles of open source, but also because it's the right thing to do from a business sense, and one dramatic example of that is being able to do radically improved distribution for our app while reducing the expense of configuration or provisioning.

Even better, while we're glad to partner with JumpBox on this kind of announcement, we also have the amazing community that's sprung up around MT since we opened up the license, and they've contributed everything from RPMs to Debian packages that are all aimed at making it even easier to get started.

[dlbyron]

What's applicable to our work is rapid prototype -- we can bang out dev blogs as appliances or beta, testing, demos, and then deploy in production.