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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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Found here earlier....
A certain argument is common among libertarians who oppose American national defense and demand that, rather than go to war to defend ourselves, we retreat from the world in the hopes that this will quell the threat. "The civilians of the aggressor country," they say, "are as innocent the soldiers of the country that was attacked, since neither has initiated force. If a soldier harms a civilian, then, he is initiating force. Any act of war that harms civilians is therefore indefensible."
This argument represents the worst sort of context-dropping and the crudest form of evasion.
A war is a conflict between nations, not individuals. During a war, the proper question is not, "Did this individual initiate force against that individual?" but rather, "Did this nation initiate force against that nation?" If the answer is yes, then the nation that was attacked should respond by retaliating against the aggressor nation in an effort to destroy that nation's capacity and willingness to fight. It must be guided by a single principle: self-defense.
Just as an individual shouldn't sacrifice his own life for fear of harming an innocent bystander in the course of defending himself, so an innocent nation shouldn't sacrifice the lives of its citizens in order to avoid harming or killing the citizens of an belligerent nation. A government's responsibility is to protect the rights of its citizens. The moment it willingly sacrifices them for any reason whatever, it's betraying that responsibility.
"The moral principle," writes Onkar Ghate, "is: the responsibility for all deaths in war lies with the aggressor who initiates force, not with those who defend themselves."
At this point, one might raise the legitimate question, isn't this collectivism? Aren't we holding innocent individuals culpable for sins of their government, sins they did not commit?
Let me quote Ayn Rand's answer and then expand on her formulation:
Q: What should be done about the killing of innocent people in war?
AR: This is a major reason people should be concerned about the nature of their government. If by neglect, ignorance, or helplessness, they couldn't overturn their bad government and choose a better one, then they have to pay the price for the sins of their government--as all of us are paying for the sins of ours.
That's why we have to be interested in the philosophy of government and in seeing, to the extent we can, that we have a good government. A government is not an independent entity: it's supposed to represent the people of a nation.
If some people put up with dictatorship--as some do in Soviet Russia and as they did in Germany--they deserve whatever their government deserves.
Rand's point is that someone will always pay the price for an evil government. That price will be paid either by the innocent nation's citizens (its soldiers in particular) or the civilians of the aggressor nation. The libertarian premise is that both are equally innocent and so therefore the innocent solider must not "initiate force" by harming the civilian.
But this premise is false. Force has been initiated - by the civilian's nation. The civilian, then, must bear responsibility for that fact, either by helping to fight his government, fleeing the country, or recognizing the innocent nation's right to defend itself, even if it costs him his life. This follows directly from the nature of rights.
A right, according to Ayn Rand, is a right to action, not to the object of that action. The right to life, for example, is the right to take those actions necessary to support one's life - the responsibility for taking those actions is one's own. The same is true for man's right to liberty. The right to liberty is the right to take those actions necessary to secure one's liberty - the responsibility for taking those actions is one's own.
When a man's government steps beyond its pro
There are those rare moments in life when one gets to say "I told you so." Considering the circumstances, this is definitely one of those times.
Bottom line: this is a good awakening for the project. Miro has been picking the project's pockets all along.
Brian Connolly
President
Furthermore, Inc.
bconnolly @ furthermore DOT com
Rand was a real fuckup and a psychopath like most libertarians.
Do you think it was an accident that the OpenSourceMatters logo looks like a procedural diagram for a breast lift?
How the hell is this flamebait? There are many reasons why our company is apprehensive about moving to an open source architecture and this is one of them.
alias dir='rm -rf
Disclaimer: I'm not involved with Mambo in any way, but I have dealt with similar issues before.
Indeed. The problem here is that Mambo was a very mature community, and large communities eventually start having problems that involve legal and other matters. You need a foundation to handle such things. All the people complaining that things should have just stayed the same simply do not understand the issues beyond their own nose.
Lots of people are angry that they were't "consulted" or that the community didn't "vote". This ignores the fact that there is no legal way to take a vote from the community (that's one of the problems a foundation solves). They are also complaining that Miro picked the board, rather than having the community "vote" on it (see previous point).
The problem is that when you form a foundation, you need to appoint a board to oversee the intial creation and running of the foundation. Since there are no members to legally vote on the board before the foundation exists, they MUST be appointed. After they are appointed, and you have a means to join the foundation and be a member, you can hold a new election to put people in that the community HAS voted on. This also seems to have been lost on the majority of "knee jerk" responses.
All in all, this very reaction illustrates the very NEED for a legal governing body over the project, yet the core devs want to go off and create yet another lawless community that will (mark my words) eventually have this EXACT SAME PROBLEM once again down the line.
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Howdy, Well, it's quite rightly good to see that ya'll are takin' an interest in our humble community, and the mutiny that lily livered Peter Lamont has sprung on us...
I've been doin' my bit to provide coverage of this debacle since the shi... sugar hit the fan on my blog site - Mambo Foundation discussion with the Lone Mamber. http://lonemamber.blogspot.com/
If you're after a lowdown on what's happened so far, pop on over 'cos I've been coverin' this thang as it happens.
Thankye kindly for your support of the Mambo core dev team and the community,
The Lone Mamber