You’re right that MTOS won’t cost anything as it is GPL, just like Wordpress is. It’s just as you say that no-one really knows what features make it to the OS version.

I think their need for GPL’d version comes from competition (notably Wordpress), but I also believe they still want most of their commercial clients to go for the paid MT4. It’s a balancing act, let’s see how it plays out.

Of course, in time, people are free to impelement the “missing” features to MTOS themselves – at least inofficially.

One thing though, you said:

“The major difference between MT4 and Wordpress is that the latter is totally free. Six Apart has promised a Open Source version of MT4 later, but that probably doesn’t change the fact that for commercial use, MT4 is going to cost you a little.”

Not true. Commercial use of the MTOS will not cost anyone. GPL is GPL. What will cost you is if you want support (and other contractual things company lawyers like) from Six Apart and some advanced features (via addon packs) like Oracle or LDAP support.

What is not determined is what exactly is MTOS (6A has stated that it won’t just be the current product with a different license) and what features over time will they choose not to GPL.

I too am very attracted to the MT4 platform, after extensively working on Wordpress (.com and .org) blogs and Blogspot-ones. It just seems fresher and the editor feels like it’s the way things should be. On Wordpress/Blogger’s versions, I never know how the editor will format things, which is highly annoying, and, for instance, lead to many formatting issues on our About-page. Then again, I’m one of those people who likes to pay for blogging-editors to avoid those problems, like the excellent Marsedit and Ecto.

The biggest qualm I have about the hosted solution of Wordpress, however, is the lack of support for 3rd party code. Wordpress.com pretty much prevents you from installing any script or embedding any flash-code; for the latter they only support YouTube, as far as I know. Instead they should keep a safe-list of services that work, and keep updating it.

And, but this is an internal issue, I don’t think that Wordpress.com manages the process of migrating to new domains well at all. The loss of page-rank, as suffered by this blog, is inexcusable and would even be cause for an immediate refund, if you ask me.

But yeah, I don’t want my bitterness to distract your MT4 discussion