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Mambo CMS Dev Team Splits
cozimek writes "The popular Mambo CMS developer team has severed its ties with Miro Corporation, the copyright owner on the GPL'd Mambo CMS. You can read more about the renegade dev team."
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its not a problem the development team will be continuing to develop.
they just wont do so under the dictatorship of miro
You can read about what is Mambo CMS here.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
They left the company because it would not care about the need of users. The same devs will continue to develop Mambo. Everything is fine.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
The very definition of open source software is that anyone is allowed to modify and distribute it. The GPL was created for the entire purpose of allowing this, so why would doing so be concidered "questionable legal dealings"? There are no legal ramifications whatsoever, except the possibility that they may have to change the name / logo of the project if Miro has trademarked it.
The whole web application framework was written in PHP. So of course it has alot to do w/ PHP
So it looks like nothing much will change for people who use the software. If anything, this incident is an example of why you want your business-critical software to be open source. You're not necessarily screwed when somethign like this happens.
As a counter example: as the tech market was fixing to implode, the VC funding one of our vendors decided that the company would be mroe likely to sell if they used an ASP service model instead of selling software. So they stopped selling their software. There would be no more upgrades and no more licenses; the only option offered to us was to move to their hosted solution. Basically we were screwed. If the software were GPL, we wouldn't have been.
Relicensing code under a more stringent license would not do anything useful. The code has already been licensed as GPL, you can't retroactively withdraw it. Since the GPL permits redistribution, the owner of the code can't do anything.
So a forked right version quite obviously would have multiple copyright holders, for the new and old code. Right? Right.
right
What happens to the forked version if and when the copyright holder decides to re-license their code under a more stringent license?
nothing
Are they now forced to either license the code or drop the product?
no. they still have a valid license to use the code they have under the GPL. The owner changing licenses has no effect on people who already have a valid license.
What happens if they re-license to a non-derivative license?
doesnt matter
Is the forked version permanently grandfathered in, so that they can continue to modify the code? I'm not really sure at all how this works.
no need to grandfather it in. The codebase they are working off of is still licensed under the GPL.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Once you receive a copy of the software under a specific license or terms, that can't be retro actively changed by the copyright owner (Unless that was agreed upon in a contract).
Take SSH as an example. The original versions by Tatu Ylönen were released under a free license until version 1.2.12. After that he started adding various rescritions to his licenses until finally turning it into closed source purely commercial software.
The OpenBSD team was able to take the last free version 1.2.12 and fork it into a new project OpenSSH which has since surpased the original SSH (now OSSH) in functionality, features and popularity.
OpenSSH still holds some of Tatu's original code which he still owns the copyrights for, but since that code was released to the public under a free license with no restrictions on it's use, he can't now come back and tell the OpenSSH developers they can no longer use that code.
Q2. Is it legal to start a new fork like this?
A. The GPL guarantees this possibility. It's one of the better reasons for choosing GPL'd software - you are assured that if the product is good but the management is bad, the developers are free to continue their work.
Actually, that's an attribute common to ALL free and open source licenses, not just the GPL. You can't prohibit forking and still be approved by the FSF or OSI.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
http://www.ssh.com/company/newsroom/article/663/
>> In other words, you must NOT pretend that Mambo
>> is yours, and you must NOT charge people for
>> Mambo iteself.
> I thought that GPL software could be sold as
> long as the source was attached.
Yes, and you're right. You can sell the software for whatever price you'd like, but you MUST keep it under GPL licence which means you have to provide the source and the people who paid you money can again sell it or give it away. You CAN'T relicence the program if you don't have the COMPLETE copyright for it.
Some companies go to great lengths to make sure they have the complete copyright for the code they release and then they have the possibility to have the software as GPL and as a commercial licence (e.g. the competitor to Mambo: eZ publish or QT). But even they can't take back code that they've once licenced under the GPL.
I really dislike people who spin things like the mambo people. It's clearly stated in the GPL FAQ.
It does a disservice to the GPL licence because people get confused. And it only discourages people who don't know the GPL well enough.
At the end of the day what does it matter?
The current release does all my clients need or will ever need for a run of the mill site. I make my living using mambo, oscommerce and zencart and customising to the need of my clients.
The codebase has it's problems but for "free" is more than I could have accomplished in years.
My clients will still be happy when I say "Yes I can do that" to a complicated brief and have a fully working CMS skinned within a week with more "features" than they could possibly use. For what would have cost $10,000, and taken 9 months back in 2000.
For a one man band like me mambo has been a great tool. And whatever happens next the code as it stands now is more than enough for me to use for the next few years.
AM