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

There is no Core members in the MF

[Anonymous Coward]

Since there is no Core Team members among Mambo Foundation Board of Directors it looks like Miro transfered copyright to themselves.
With the only difference that now it is called Mambo Foundation, not Miro.

This is just another great example when Ethics is more important than money.

Empty gesture

[Deffexor]

This gesture by Miro is an empty one. It seems to me that Miro has shot themselves in the foot over this Mambo Foundation and made themselves look awfully foolish. Right now they are attempting damage control by trying to appear like "good guys" with all these disingenuous gestures.

All the coding talent that was behind Mambo has since left to form their own foundation. To find out what the ex-developers of Mambo are up to, visit OpenSourceMatters

Disclosure: Yes, I'm the one who wrote the Mambo developer exodus report on Ars Technica.

Re:Empty gesture

[Deusy]

So... Miro created Mambo and released it under the GPL. They then created the Mambo Foundation to look after the interests of Mambo. What's the problem? Why did the Foundation need to own the copyrights? It's not like Miro could revoke the GPL nor, without the explicit permission of the volunteer developers, publish a closed source version incorporating any non-Miro contributions.

The words 'mountain' and 'molehill' spring to mind?

forking....

[rd4tech]

kids, it's the true power the developers have in the open source projects... now for the next lesson: sales.

This is too little too late

[pasamio]

If the Foundation had of been set up the way the MSC and the Core Devs wanted, this would have been good, but the damage has been done by Miro. They can't take it back and they are only trying to make ammends. They aren't transferring the copyright far, considering that they control the Mambo Foundation, so who is the real winner? Not open source. OpenSourceMatters is where the new work is going and that is where I am going to stake my claim and pitch my tent.

Re:This is too little too late

[fucksl4shd0t]

I'll tell you what. I see a lot of childish bickering going back and forth. I see developers saying one thing and doing another. I see a company saying one thing and doing another.

I'm going to find me a new CMS. I don't need this shit on my website, there's plenty of other projects out there for me to use.

It's not like Mambo is all that great. Having done a fair amount of third-party component development, and having suffered a fair amount of the third party components that are available, I'm not entirely sure I'm going to be sad. The thing that really irks me is that now I have to migrate my database.

Hm. Anybody up for a python-based CMS that uses Mambo's database? ;)

I don't Mambo

[Ranger]

I think PHP is great, but I don't think it's quite ready for a robust content management system. The PHP CMS community is very fragmented. When shopping around for a good open source CMS, I found a profileration of nukes. The two CMSes I considered seriously were Mambo and Drupal. Both of them have had some recent issues that made me glad I didn't pick them. Not only that there were some serious PHP security issues. I've been a fan of Perl far longer, but was amazed at how quickly I could slap together usable stuff in PHP. And I didn't choose a Perl based CMS either.

Ultimately, I chose Plone which sits on top of Zope which sits on top of Python. It can sit behind Apache, You can use it with other other databases than it's own weird object db, but it's not easy. It also has a steep learning curve. Despite all these drawbacks and concerns, Plone is the most robust, secure, and ready to use out of the box CMS I've found.

Maybe it was just dumb luck and the recent problems with Mambo, Drupal, and PHP made me feel better about my decision. I'm still learning Zope and Plone, but I'm impressed that I can throw stuff together pretty quickly with it, even though hides stuff in non-intuitive locations.

Re:I don't Mambo

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that there were some serious PHP security issues.

That concerns me too -- with PHP in general. PHP supporting libs and PHP apps tend to have a disproportinately high number of security issues, and locking them down is either impossible or practically so (requiring a layer of filters).

While I do not reject a web service because it is PHP based, using PHP does raise the questions;

'Is it secure enough that mere mortals can manage it safely?'

'Can it be confidently secured at all even if I put an additional level of effort into it?'

Unfortunately, the answer usually turns out to be no or a very uncertian maybe.

Keep in mind that I am not saying other web toolkits are fine and dandy; I've rejected other web services for the same reasons. It's just the % of security problems seems to be much higher. Yes, I realize that I am being highly subjective.

OpenSourceMatters

[mporcheron]

OpenSourceMatters is proves that despite power-hungry companies such as Miro can't always win, as in this case it shows that not everyone goes with the flow.

Foundation controlled by CEO I beleive

[augustz]

My understanding is that the Miro CEO appointed all or most of the board members of the foundation, without much community involvement.

This contrasts with most open source foundations where the folks developing the code or trusted parties end up as the board.

Re:What is the significance?

[ShieldW0lf]

A better question might be, what will the CEOs of other companies considering releasing their sources make of this very high-profile example? With all the crazy spin being put on everything from both sides, it's hard to tell what the hell went on, but it sure doesn't look good to me.

If you're going to go public with a list of "community demands", they sure as hell ought to be visibly reasonable and they ought to be something you honour. If Miro is, however begrudgingly, giving in to these demands, there should be some sort of positive reaction from the community, not posting comments about how they didn't really leave over these demands but that it was a whole bunch of little things.

Perception matters, and regardless of the facts, this isn't looking good on the developers.

Re:What is the significance?

[pbailey]

Hmmm, perception does matter. That's an interesting perspective that you have, I was thinking that this really does not look good on Miro. Lol. They managed to alienate the whole dev community in one swoop. Now the question is, what is the Mambo foundation going to do with a bunch of code and no one that knows its internals. The people who know and love the code have moved on to do things they way they believe they should be done. I think I am hearing that Miro is trying to convince the world that it would be good to get a new dev team - nice try!