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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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mambo is dead- let lambada live! or was it tchachaha? or are any developers now not only living under a line but also dancing below one (aka Limbo)
Conclusion: we may expect inspired names for the forks that propably descend of this
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there's only one thing worse than biting yourself in your arse. get bitten.
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"
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
Shouldn't worry about that.
The code is gpl, the name is trademarked. The developers went their own way.
There are still going to be new releases only the name will change.
And yes, I'm sure you can easely upgrade from mambo to $newname. From my point of view, the new mambo is going to be even more free than it was before. This actually isn't a 'open source' problem since closed source licences (and prices) can change in new versions of the product your using.
With open source you have at least the freedom to 'take the code and run' when the maintainers of that code do something you're not happy with.
--> Insert Funny Sig Here
I guess you picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
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
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.
This seems to me like the result of the current Open Source Hype in the investment community. Some entrepreneural types think that if they just go ahead and pay a lawyer to file the paperwork for a foundation, they instantly become like Apache and Firefox in the eyes of the VC's, and this is a clear example that it couldn't be further from the truth and that forming and maintaining a foundation for "bragging rights" ("we have formed a foundation - who-hoo!") bytes back big time.
It'd be interesting to see what happens next - I think this foundation would have to be dissolved and will probably lose its tax-exempt status?
Though this situation will undoubtedly be used by certain pundits and businesses as cannon fodder against OSS, I think it only goes to show how the GPL empowers those who do the work. If the entire team (i.e. "the workers") get up, say "thank you" and fork the code, things like brand name, copyright and such suddenly become completely useless.
It's knowledgeable people that are the only true resource in the case - let's see Miro just replace all of them overnight and beat the forked version this team will be working on.
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.
So some other program now exists that's based on the same code. How does this affect you? It's some other program! It may offer you some nice options, i.e. you may be able to switch over to the new system, but otherwise, you're unaffected!
You might just as justifiably claim that Linux/PPC is a "problem" for OS/X users. It's not a problem, it's an alternative! And one you're welcome to ignore if you so choose!
Sheesh!
Ah, yes. Open source shows its strength again... BY FORKING.
So what's wrong with that? None of us would be here today if not for the cardinal pleasures of fu- Oh... You said "Forking".
Never mind...
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.
If Mambo had been a closed source product, and the company that developed it started misbehaving (raising prices, making changes that ruin it, etc.), then the users of Mambo would be _screwed_.
With closed source, the only choices for Mambo users would be to accept the bad changes (higher prices, etc.), or give up using Mambo.
But, since Mambo is Open Source, Mambo users are _protected_.
With Open Source, when a developer starts misbehaving, anyone else has the option of forking the code, in order to ensure that the preferred direction is maintained.
So everyone should ignore the trolls and astroturfers who are calling this a weakness of Open Source. On the contrary, it is a strength. It protects users from having to suffer at the hands of a disreputable company, as, for example, Microsoft's customers have suffered.
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.
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.
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