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

Except the devs specifically say this isn't a fork

[misha69]

But why bother reading #1 in the FAQ? 1. Is this a fork of the Mambo project? No, it is a rebranding effort that will continue to run largely on the existing codebase. Work is continuing on the project by the same team that has developed Mambo as you know it today. Therefore we see it as continuing development rather than a 'fork'.

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.

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

[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.

Expression nazi

[Anonymous Coward]

...backflipping on a previous policy...

After a backflip you still face the same direction.

Re:Geez.

[pasamio]

They are coming up with a new name, they just haven't announced it yet, be patient and stay tuned to opensourcematters!

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:Except the devs specifically say this isn't a f

[VonSlatt]

Our branch isn't the fork! the other branch is the fork!

While I tend to agree with the sentiment, yah can't claim it's not a fork if the end result is two development trees.

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.