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Movable Type goes virtual with JumpBox

Six Apart's open-source blogging platform is now an easy-to-install virtual appliance, thanks to virtual-appliance vendor JumpBox. It's free for developers and bloggers.

Matt Asay Contributing Writer
Matt Asay is a veteran technology columnist who has written for CNET, ReadWrite, and other tech media. Asay has also held a variety of executive roles with leading mobile and big data software companies.
Matt Asay

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.