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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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Just what I need.
I just started migrating my own site, and setting up seveal client sites using Mambo. It seemed the flexible/functional OSS CMS out there for my needs.
Now I have to deal with a fork and worrying about patches to 2 different lines (not to mention all the plugins).
This is not going to be fun.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I looked up mamboportal.com, and saw the following:
...During the last month more and more users registered at our website. Since today we had more than 100,000 registered users.
... ... I gues you can imagine how long it takes to load a page with a 100,000 entrys drop down menu.
...
Why? Mambo's user management is very simple and has not changed much since the early days. For example Mambo uses a drop down menu in the content items to select the creator of an article.
However as I want to move forward with Mamboportal.com and the new team I decided to clear the whole userdatabase today. Every of the 100,000 registered users will be informed about that via Email the next days.
I guess open source really does matter in this respect : if it doesn't work, change it yourself. Opensource will really help to mature this product even further.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Q1. But forking is bad!
A. No, not unless it splits the team, and even then competition is as good a driver as collaboration. Many of the most successful products come from forked versions that eventually out-evolved their ancestors. Homo Sapiens is a good example.
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.
Q3. What about the copyrights?
A. The copyright allows the owner to (a) define the license terms, (b) change these over time, e.g. from GPL to APL, etc., and (c) sell alternative licenses, e.g. commercial opt-out licenses for a GPL'd product.
Q4. So the copyright owner could sell opt-out licenses for a fork?
A. No! The forked code will now have multiple copyright owners - the new and the old code. The copyright owner can only license their own code.
Q5. What would have happened if Mambo was licensed under a BSD-style license originally?
A. Probably exactly the same, except that it would have forked earlier. The GPL discourages forking because it gives the copyright owners more incentive to "hold the work together" at some level.
Q6. Is this bad for Mambo?
A. Certainly not. It's good publicity, and a little fighting always strengthens team spirit, so long as the enemy is clear. Let's all kick the corporations!!!
Q7. How do you know all this stuff?
A. I don't, I'm just making it up as I go along.
Q8. You're kidding?
A. Yes. Gotcha!
Q9. Is that all?
A. Yes, I'm just trying to get to 10 questions. Maybe that was a bit ambitious. Should I go and change it to "7 easy questions"?
Q. No, ten is a nice number.
A. Exactly.
My blog
Let me put on the hat of a CIO or small business owner who has some infrastructure built around Mambo (which BTW is along with e107, XOOPS and Plone one of the absolute best FLOSS CMS packages) - I've heard that "free software" is not the same as "open source", along with RMS taking potshots at ESR and viceversa, with Bruce Perens standing in the middle yelling "it's all OK folks, don't panic!" and here I have the "core developers" of this otherwise excellent CMS apparently can't tell their two philosophies apart, but they've forked the project nonetheless. The next time I need to upgrade or patch things should be fun.
Pity. Plone and a host of other projects have successfully transitioned from hobby operations to foundations, but apparently this time something went wrong. Perhaps Miro got too greedy for their own good.
Well, at least they have the option of forking.
Q3. What about the copyrights?
A. The copyright allows the owner to (a) define the license terms, (b) change these over time, e.g. from GPL to APL, etc., and (c) sell alternative licenses, e.g. commercial opt-out licenses for a GPL'd product.
So a forked right version quite obviously would have multiple copyright holders, for the new and old code. 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? Are they now forced to either license the code or drop the product? What happens if they re-license to a non-derivative license? 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.
--- What
The only resistance to open source comes from bad managers. Open source is a motivator to manage a project well and treat your people fairly, or risk losing them.
When I heard about this Mambo foundation thing I thought "Oh, so your ripping of the crappy part of the Typo3 development hype here in germany". Just months after this strange T3 Foundation popped up.
Mambo is the best looking OSS CMS but it has it's lasting issues with usability. Building a Foundation won't change that, have people ignore it and pump up the turnover with Miro services.
Time and time again I've considered getting down with Mambo improvement but I was hesitant that Mambo quirks persisted so long for a reason and that deving would've meant forking Mambo right from the get-go.
Bingo.
I'm glad that is settled now.
Now if the Typo3 folks calm down again and see to it going PHP 5 and OOP without wasting too much time with a 'foundation' and its various costly 'membership options', we can get back to work and have two PHP CMSes to rule them all.
Time to join the [fill in Mambos new name here] Team.
BTW, there are OSS projects that actually benefit from a foundation. One's the former commercial 3D Package Blender. Ton Roosendahl uses the Blender Stichting as a versatile tool to pull larger Blender development and project stunts. It's tied to a tight knitt team of all-time participants and lacks a pesky babble and paper-releasing faction. A very good example for an OSS foundation that works.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
... this doesn't bother me one bit. While this is an opportunity for the Mambo developers to get their act together and formalize the development process in an effort to bring some much needed stability to the platform definition, personally it doesn't make a spit of difference to me because I gave up on using it for anything more than a session management and user registration framework - everything else is custom code, so it doesn't matter how many additional patches, plugins and whatever else they come up with for a new branch because I won't use any of it. Mambo was exciting to me at first because of all the plugins and thrid party support for the platform, but...
I since discovered that the lack of a clearly defined specification for the platform has done away with the concept of backward compatability which depracates and/or orphans modules, plugins and "API" coding conventions for module developers nearly every other release. This process has resulted in a complete failure to amass wide-spread availability of compatible module/component/plugin support. After spending a couple weeks fine tuning my first Mambo installation only so see a new release with a CRITICAL security patch which was no longer compatible with any of the components/modules I was using, I gave up trying to keep up.
So all legalities aside, this is an opportunity for the new and improved Mambo team to put together a new and improved product that is worthy of third party developers' time.
"Disclaimer: I'm not involved with Mambo in any way, but I have dealt with similar issues before."
Being that you are posting in the forums with an IP address from one of the Mambo Foundation Board Members' clients, I'm forced to say you are intentionally deceiving us.
There are more details at Ars Technica, providing a little more background to the events leading up to present.
Disclaimer: I am one of the developers involved, and will openly admit it. Sure wished everyone else could be as honest, and cannot wait to get things done proper.
Mitch Pirtle (spacemonkey)
OpenSourceMatters.org
"The mind is a terrible thing to, um, uh, oh bollocks." -- Me
What a fat load of balone. The whole point of setting up the foundation was to try and get a focus and head Mambo down a path rather than floundering and adding stupid modules and components that only geek developers will use. This is all so mis-informed and flame driven. Get your facts straight first.