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."

Comments

Re:Geez.

[drakaan]

Why should we stay tuned? From all appearances, "The Developers" have done their best to marginalize themselves.

...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.

Re:This is too little too late

[Anthony Boyd]

Sheesh man, cheer for victories, no matter how incomplete. Open source advocates should take what the can get and always push for more, not bitch about how spoiled their victory is.

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.