Mambo Users Threatened

An anonymous reader writes "Newsforge has an article about a recent dispute over code in Mambo (a Free CMS). A Mr. Connolly has sent threatening emails to Mambo users over this, a move John Weathersby of OSSI was quoted as saying 'That's ... not prudent.' The dispute is over some trivial code that checks whether a story is a lead story and if so displays it across multiple columns, as it's a modification of GPL code the Mambo team maintain it must remain GPL but Mr. Connolly claims otherwise."

Comments

Re:FUD

[Rantastic]

The different (sic) is that FUD - fear, uncertainty, doubt - can in fact be grounded in reality

Actually, you are incorrect.

The term FUD was coined by Gene Amdahl, who had left IBM to design and sell competing mainframes. He used the acronym FUD to describe IBMs marketing tactices. Namely that IBM salesmen (sorry ladies, they were all men at the time!) would use various missleading statements to leave a potention customer with Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about by products from companies other than IBM. Hence the saying "No one ever got fired for buying IBM."

In more recent times FUD is used to describe similiar, missleading statements by Microsoft, such as "Linux costs more to use than Windows."

Bottom line, saying "I will sue you for stealing my code" when one has no grounds to sue, is FUD. Saying, "You will be more vulnerable to viruses if you do not use anti-virus software" is not FUD.