MovableType was the established blogging tool for self–hosted blogs. SixApart (the developers) had had a very loose licensing system, it was basically free for

MovableType was the established blogging tool for self–hosted blogs. SixApart (the developers) had had a very loose licensing system, it was basically free for most users. MT had a couple of design flaws which became major problems as individual blogs grew, it build everything as static pages, did very little caching, and the default templates caused rebuilds for every comment or trackback. While most of those design flaws could be addressed, people started using B2/cafelog which was forked into WordPress. Around this same time period, SixApart started chasing $ down and pushed through a seemingly suicidal licensing change which was poorly communicated and caused many independent bloggers to switch to WordPress. MovableType development stalled even as WordPress shifted gears and rapidly became popular with Automattic being founded around 2004 or 2005 to commercialize Wordpress, resulting in the wordpress.com service. MovableType is now clearly a forgotten also–ran, even as static web publishing has regained favor with jekyll and Hugo.