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Mambo CMS Dev Team Splits

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the like-a-fine-soap-opera dept.

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."

3 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Of course they can. by pavon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Greeeat. by SpecBear · · Score: 5, Informative
    Actually, this is a much bigger problem with closed source software. Dev team quit? Well then I guess you're screwed until the copyright holder rehires. If they rehire. In the case of Mambo you have several other options available because the software is GPL:
    • Maintain the code in-house
    • Hire someone to make any changes.
    • Carry on business as normal. The Mambo team quit Miro, but they'll still be working on the code.

    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.
  3. Re:Pulling the rug out by blkwolf · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.