No, LiveJournal isn’t leaving, but it’s just as sad if you ask me. Rumors floated around the web yesterday and they were confirmed this morning. Six Apart, the company behind MovableType has purchased Danga, the company behind LiveJournal. Mena posted over on the Six Log with several links to answer any questions you may have. That article can be found here. I guess it really is a good thing for all the LJ employees as it ensures a steady stream of cash to back them in the future, but I still have this nasty taste in my mouth for anything Six Apart related. They state that they like LJ just the way it is and that nothing will change at all. That’s definitely a good thing for all the LJ fanatics I know. I found this particular answer in the FAQ quite ironic:
Q. LiveJournal is open source — what happens to the code?
A. LiveJournal will remain an open source community project. Even if the license didn’t require it, we believe strongly in open source software. Six Apart has released numerous projects under open source licenses in the past and we’re excited that we can assist LiveJournal, one of the largest and most successful open source projects. The LiveJournal code base will be actively developed, with Six Apart providing infrastructure and management expertise, enabling the LiveJournal development team to focus on what they do best ?- creating great products.
Hahahahaha – “we believe strongly in open source software.” What a crock. Maybe I’m just a snobby WordPress enthusiast, but I just have this awful taste in my mouth for anything related to 6A and MT. Am I way off base?
Off base, yes. A large percentage of our engineers actively develop and have released a plethora of open source software and Perl modules. The most prolific is Ben Trott himself who developed not only Standalone Trackback but has released some extremely important modules to CPAN (http://search.cpan.org/~btrott/) and continues to develop them.
If you also take into account that they allow me to develop MT-Blacklist (not open source, but definitely for the common good) on company time as well, it paints quite a different picture than you may be thinking of.
The point here of course is that we all believe in, use and foster open source, but that Movable Type itself happens to NOT be open source. We are extremely happy to be able to contribute as a company the infrastructure and operating expenses that Danga so desperately wanted so that they could focus on what they love doing: Developing Live Journal for the LJ community.