A group of Movable Type specialists – some of them former Six Apart employees – wanted to speed up the development of the open source version of the popular publishing platform and decided to group together in a quest to build an independent, community-driven CMS for bloggers and other publishers.
The platform is dubbed Melody and will be managed by a non-profit named The Open Melody Software Group, which has Anil Dash (Six Apart’s outspoken VP and Chief Evangelist) on its board.
via Movable Type Experts Team Up On Melody, An Open Source Publishing Platform .
Melody is a fork of the open source version of Moveable Type intended to be more community driven, like WordPress. The current open source version of Moveable Type is tied to the corporate development of the commercial MT platform. It is not clear what the exact relationship between MT and Melody will be moving forward, so this may turn out to be a true fork with the 2 platforms diverging from this point.