Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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
... 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.