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Mambo Foundation Gets Copyright, After All
daria42 writes "Responding to the concerns of developers and backflipping on a previous policy in the process, Miro, the commercial company which owns the copyright to the GPL'd Mambo content management system has decided to assign all intellectual property rights to the Mambo Foundation, which it created to manage the CMS. The company has been at the centre of a storm of controversy previously reported here on Slashdot, which has seen the core developers of the CMS fork the project."
The wonderful thing about life is that it goes on. Miro made a mistake and corrected it. Everyone who has never made a mistake please take a step forward.
Unless, you are as me uncapable of backflipping completley and land flat on your face.....
.... and developers.
Which is what I feel Miro has dont at this point, now theyre trying to smile whilee missing some teeth
Plone is the most robust, secure...
Did they stop sending the cleartext username and password of the users as a mime-encoded cookie on every request already?
...riiiiight. *All* of the core developers leave a popular project that's been downloaded over 5 million times, and it's *them* being marginalized?
This is pretty simple.
Miro: we don't want to transfer the copyrights. We want an open source "foundation" that will "control" the project, but the copyright to everything will still be ours.
Developers: screw that, we're outta here! Oh, and we're going to work on our own version of it. Good luck.
Miro: (whispering to each other) They can just leave like that? But who's gonna...(loudly) Wait! Wait! We'll transfer the copyrights...we were wrong, and we understand now! Please come back and work for us again!
Miro realized that you probably shouldn't alienate *all* of your core developers for a popular project, if you want to keep that project alive and similarly popular. I'd stay tuned.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
No, I think the grandparent post was right. There is no victory to cheer for here. The entire development team left. There are zero developers (see the small box on the right side) for the project. It's dead. And you'd have to be crazy to try to revive it, because the terms put in place for development include agreeing to be fined or otherwise penalized if you violate some unknown set of rules.
So this is all just beating a dead horse. They could next say "we've upgraded the server" and "we've found 2 new members for the Board" and any number of other praiseworthy announcements, but it wouldn't matter, because it's dead.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's irrelevant. It's hand-waving. It isn't a real victory, because it's of no use or relevance anymore. Now if they donated the copyright to the new opensourcematters.org, that would be something significant, because that's where the future product releases will be.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
I think it means that almost everyone that uses Mambo will go with the developers and upgrade to whatever they end up calling the new release when they are ready to launch. The new community up at opensourcematters.org is really gaining momentum quickly.
Not sure what this means for other CMS projects - perhaps they will gain some extra mindshare from those that are fearful of what all this means for the future of Mambo, etc. Personally, I use Mambo and I have confidence in the core developers to continue making a great product and of course it is nice that they understand what open source is all about, even if Miro/The Foundation do not.
Well, I think we are arguing different points here. I understand what you are saying, but I believe that Miro really dropped the ball on this one. A large community of developers has worked hard at making Mambo an award winning CMS. Miro started to offer commercial services around the product, and that is fine, companies need to make money.
But, I believe if this foundation thing had been managed properly, it would never have come to this. To totally piss off the entire core development groups to the point where they want to leave sounds to me like too many suits were involved and they didn't understand the can of worms they were opening up.
Imho, it would have been far better/easier to fully involve the core developers in how a foundation should be formed. That does not seem to be the case according to the devs. I know who I believe.
Cheers