To be a devil's advocate: I don't know if you can be considered aggressive if you are keeping in line with the competition and if you hear about some of the things professionals do nowadays - this doesn't even come close to aggressive.
Posterous for example while they were selling importing features for other blogs got a lot of flack for being aggressive by doing a pure feature per feature article on a popular blog service that wasn't down. It was unanimously lambasted for being over-aggressive even though it's a feature for feature comparison of a blog writer who's clearly working for Posterous and isn't even an attack ad.
No matter how many times the advocates of OSS and FOSS point that out, people still somehow have trouble understanding that. Maybe that's because the licensing employed by proprietary software products is part of the business model.
FSF promotes that most often but not FOSS as a whole. Even in this article, it's clear Wordpress wasn't branding itself as a business model OSS - it was branding itself as a cheaper alternative that won't screw you up in the middle of your usage. (hence the reference to the licensing debacle being a critical issue)
It's not about features, or technical excellence, or clean code, or any of the other critically important things software creators live with and by. Programmers constantly need to be reminded that it's not so much what they're interested in or believe. It's what the people in their deployed base want if they hope for their project to become popular.
Smart projects understand this and engage their community. And meaningfully interact with it.
People want to belong. Wordpress allowed them to do that. They got down with their users. They invited them in. They allowed them to play in the sandbox to a degree that was almost unprecedented at the time. And from that level engagement, Wordpress created a vibrant and vocal community that put it over the top.
It's not so much whether or not Wordpress is superior to MovableType. It's a question of which product, and company, and community the people like more.
In this case it was. Just see the comments for reference. It's a lot like saying people like Facebook over MySpace. Not really.
It's more like MySpace did a lot more for people to hate them. Certainly companies weren't moving to Facebook when it was an isolated social network.
Even today there are still some saying that. See this
article for example.
Wordpress doesn't have a mindshare monopoly. It has a community of early adopters because it was the superior product by a large margin for a long time. My bar may be set a differently but I dare anyone try to compare the history between Twitter and Wordpress and you'll see Wordpress remains as just another blogging platform but Twitter is a brand to itself and micro-blogging is only mentioned in the same breathe as a way to categorize Twitter.
This doesn't mean one is superior or inferior than the other (and certainly it's more like apples and oranges) but Wordpress right now is at the same position as Ning if they had a smarter less greedier team behind it and even at the peak of Ning - no one considered Ning to have won the mindshare as much as they were the best service of their kind.
MoveableType didn't have its ball taken away from it. People simply found a different ballgame they'd rather play in.
And to characterize the events and actions that led to Wordpress trouncing MovableType in collective mindshare as a "war" further reinforces my belief that he still just doesn't get it.
No, I think he's correct.
If MovableType didn't do such huge critical mistakes - sure, different ballgame. Better model.
MovableType though wasn't a good alternative. It was just a leader in the same way Wordpress is the leader now. Only difference between the two is MovableType kept fumbling what was already an inferior service to Wordpress to begin with.
Let's face it - to ignore this is not a war is to ignore the crust of how services get ignored. Again to reference what someone said in the comments, how come Serendipity doesn't get as much press aside from those Wordpress vs. Serendipity articles? Little of that has to do with FOSS and more on how Wordpress wages a war while Serendipity doesn't.
