“MT has gotten to the top of the heap because of its wide adoption.” That’s like saying that pizza is a popular food only because people are always eating it, or that Napoleon was short because of his diminutive stature. Stoopid. The Moveable Type people produced a free, partially open-source tool (you can’t redistribute your modified code, but you can tell other people how you modified it) that works beautifully for the most part(although that comment spam thing is a bit of a problem) and have done a great job of supporting, promoting, and developing it. And they certainly haven’t gone out of their way to stifle their competition: There are umpteen open-source blogging and CMS applications out there to choose from (B. Mann Consulting mentions a couple), none of them subject to hostile takeovers by the evil Trotts, as far as I know! They had an astute intuition about what kind of tool a lot of bloggers would want and need after growing out of Blogger, and they built it, and then they produced a moderately priced pay version, TypePad, that capitalized on the goodwill they earned from their free product, which they continue to develop and support.