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What Really Happened with Mambo?
Anonymous Coward writes "What Happened with Mambo?
There is a good article about the recent events that resulted in a changing of the guard at Mambo. Jem Matzan does his best to objectively debunk what happened. It looks like much research was conducted to produce this article and it is very informative. Check it out!" In the interest of full disclosure as well, our corporate parent also hosts Joomlaforge.
Here's a link to the google cached version of the page. Google Cache.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
All these tropical music styles seem to follow a cycle of sudden, quick popularity, quick fall back into oblivion as a new, hotter style is "discovered" and then a revival every other decade. Mambo wouldn't be different.
Hmmm... You don't have to do much research to see that the future lies with Joomla. Basically the entire development team - the same team that made mambo great - left and they are working on Joomla now. How safe is to stay with a product that has "we are looking for developers" on their website for months? Especially since joomla! offers a clear migration path... Basically the first release is latest mambo with trademarks stripped out, so the sooner one switches the better...
If we compare the "roadmap" of the two projects, joomla has a clearer vision of the future, so yeah, I don't think mambo is a safe bet from what I've seen.
I just tried to come up with a good way to pitch either of these projects to a corporate decision making panel. I couldn't get past the names. I realize names shouldn't have an effect on a product, but appearance shouldn't have an effect on our first impressions of people either. Pitch that to your local HR weenie and see how it bounces.
The people coming up with these names really have to step back and see how they sound in a boardroom.
Good luck though!
Hmm. Why is Shawn Carey, who posts news items to the official Mambo website labelled as Anonymous Coward when submitting this story? Hover over the link, that's his email address. A bit suspicious that an interested party is submitting stories as Anonymous Coward, don't you think?
Second this. Would it be so hard to put something like "What Happened with Mambo, the opensource CMS project?"
Yes, I'm aware that google is available. But I'd rather not have to go do a search for a simple definition.
But then again, this is slashdot and, like dupes and Yakov Smirnoff ripoffs, this simple request will be ignored by the masses.
Humorless sig goes here.
At the Samba School:
The Penetrada: It makes sex look like church.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
There are a bazillion Open Source CMS out there. I remember when Post Nuke and PHP-Nuke were it. Now it looks like a befuddled mess where posting on MySpace looks attractive.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
OK, I tried to read that article, but it's not happening. All I need to know: I have a site running Mambo 4.5.2. I try to keep the most recent version installed. (Yes, I am one release behind.) Do I need to be at all concerned over any of these developments?
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Thank God! I had almost given up waiting for Mambo No. 5.
Basically, the actual developers who developed Mambo all left.
And for some pretty good reasons. The bylaws of the non-profit foundation were the craziest I've seen (and I used to review bylaws). Clearly designed to lock in control at the top for Miro.
I've been around a long time, and some of the mambo and mambo foundation stunts are huge red-flags for a nonprofit.
I bet when we dig below the surface of the article, we'll find that the submitter (who is shawn@uberdev.com) has a vested interest in this?
Also, tend to beleive the code talks and talk walks. Curious to know how many core developers stayed with Mambo.
And to be honest I like the feel of the Joomla community a bit better, from ducking into both sets of forums. Don't run either package however.
So does this mean mama doesn't love Mambo?
http://www.joomla.org/
The analysis is interesting, and raises some good points about keeping open source projects stable. While forking projects is certainly good for competition, it is probably less efficient than simply focussing on a single well-run project. So, to avoid this kind of circus, my advice to open source teams working with corporate sponsors would be:
1. The copyright does not matter as much as you think, so long as the software is released under a foss license. This is, really, the whole point of the license.
2. Any revenue from services will go to the people who know the software, so ultimately it's better to be working on the code than to be paying for the project, if revenue is your long-term goal.
3. The economics of a sponsored open source project should be discussed early and be clear. No-one can work uneconomically. Settle the money aspects well beforehand, and avoid disputes. IMO, ideally, the corporate sponsor should get an immediate benefit from the technology, while the development team should get the "product" as their baby.
4. In today's world, owning copyright is actually becoming a bad thing - it can lead to software patent lawsuits. There are good arguments for FOSS sponsors to pass the copyrights to non-profit foundations, which can be sued but with little benefit and much bad publicity.
5. If you're going to argue, don't do it publically. It's too easy to overreact, say things that one regrets afterwards.
That's it. It's nice to see corporate sponsorship of FOSS work, since it can be such a natural and mutually beneficial way of working. But watch out for the money! It turns even the best friendships into bitter disputes unless the rules are well-agreed beforehand.
My blog
As an admin at his hosting company, I can't really see why it's /.'d. Maybe I should have a tech have a peak at the server...
Sometimes I feel like a nut... Ok so it's most of the time
The whole situation can be sumarized as:
Miro started Mambo. They did the original work, they got the ball rolling and so they believed that they were entitled to be in charge.
Some of the Mambo community developers did a lot of work on Mambo and, arguably, Mambo wouldn't be here today without them. While they didn't start it, they saw their contributions are paramount and they thought they were entitled to be in charge.
Mostly, it's a battle of ego. Anyone who reads the Joomla! website can see that it's a battle of ego. They tried to claim that it was a renaming, that they were the real Mambo, that they were better than Mambo, etc. Frankly, which one is the "real" Mambo is a philosophical question that I think is stupid, but it's easy to see that this is an ego fight between two camps who both have legitimate claims to leadership of the project.
Since the board defines what is "prejudicial/unbecoming", they can basically remove folks who they don't like, perhaps even dinging them in the process with a $500 fine.
Imagine if you were a corporate shareholder, and agreed to rules like these. It would be very hard to kick out existing board members.
In some cases, you do want board members to maintain control, and might simply avoid voting of membership or make votes advisory. However, Miro and the Foundation are making a big deal about the fact that the members control the foundation, so its worth looking at the actual rules.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mambo_(CMS)
Same reaction here, except WTF is CMS?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Bottom line, I think, will be which team implements workflow and access control features that finally bring Mambo in line with mature commercial projects. When that happens, I bet you'll see the momentum shift to the team that pulls it off.
-Laz
"The Jem Report
This site is temporarily unavailable.
Please notify the System Administrator " Ahem
The 30th Nov an exploit against Mambo was announced discretely on the Mambo page. The 3rd of December my sole Mambo site was toast. I found out about the Mambo vs Joomla thing when looking for security updates.
As a result of what I read I dropped Mambo and Joomla and started looking for a Java Portal...
realkiwi
CMS stands for Content Management System. It's a framework that manages the guts of a web site for you, you provide the content, it does the rest.
Go to http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ for example to see a few of them. There are hundreds. Mambo is one. There are others. Some are easier to work with than others. See for yourself.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
The whole thing was a mess. I was one of the few begging the core to rethink the fork and took some abuse.
However, any real review of forum activity and project active will show Joomla walked away with most of the community. When I read this article the points I see crafted into the narrative were:
1. The whole thing was just a big misunderstanding (I think mostly true)
2. Lamont meant no harm but was overly protective and the core were too emotional (minor slant)
3. Mambo is better than before and there is secret log info to discount the public activity you see on the forums and forge. (This is the core marketing message in this article, because it is the core question on the minds of the masses)
4. Joomla may just be a fad. (Pay no attention to the activity at Joomla, better to stick with an established player. More marketing message)
Nicely crafted marketing for Mambo.
1. sound fair create a feeling of trust
2. spin hard that Mambo is even better without all those emotional folks who were forced to develop for Joomla with threats no one will talk about
3. Suggest that Joomla has an unsure future. (just seed some doubt)
What I know from way too many hours on both sites at the split.
There were egos on both sides.
*No one was really interested in compromise
*There were money concerns on both sides (Gee shouldn't all good software come from the independently wealthy or homeless destitute, because making money from software is evil?)
*Joomla right now has a more active community. But Mambo is far from dead
*Choosing one over the other is no more a problem than choosing any other software. Both forks will at some point break some things making some upgrades a royal pain!!
As someone who works in marketing and message crafting for software, this story was about creating an impression for Mambo and against Joomla. It is done in a very skillful way to create trust, then use that to spin impressions. The best marketing reads as "truth."
If you eliminate the CMSs running on crufty hole-ridden PHP, there aren't very many.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I used mambo and then joomla to host a site that I hope some day will compare with the evil Ken Rockwell in the photography world: Everything Photographic While still very beta the site looks good and is easy to maintain. This in my mind is far better than all the sites I've coded by hand in the past. I'm at the point where I feel like the content should take my time, not the coding. Joomla rocks.
Why would there be something wrong with it? Who else would you have submit a story than people who know something about it? Who would think a story interesting to others who wasn't interested in it themselves?
I've mentionned Ruby On Rails once in a meeting... Never again! People are still making jokes about it...
Joomla seems to advocate porn. Look at their demo page -- it has a direct, working link to xxx.com. While they may have intended this to be an "example.com" type of link, probably not the best choice -- or maybe it is, depending on your point of view!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Look, if they can't get a Slashdot article to say what Mambo *is*, and the people who reply say you really ought to be using Joomla instead, without any explanation about that either, and the website's Slashdotted because nobody else can figure out what it is and the website has too much graphical content to survive that many downloads, they're obviously not good at documentation or naming. Is Mambo a development environment, or a game, or a compiler, or another guy you're supposed to vote for instead of Kodos?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
How do you think these sounded when they were first pitched in a boardroom? "what the hell is a google?" "Wohoo for yahoo?"
Jeff
not what happened.. but.. who cares?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
My imagination is the only limit.
http://www.zombo.com/
You mean like SlashCode?
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
Why was it better when there were fewer, less flexible choices available?
+++ATH0
The article is NOT pretty good, and I have to wonder who the anonymous coward was that submitted it.
Mambo management sought to highjack the entire project and the work of the developers and retake it private.
They were called on it and are now in a situation where they continue to behave badly. (As this article shows)
you didn't catch the 3 +5 informative posts in a row giving you the cached link, here it is again: http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:KqYsB31xnwcJ:ww w.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/212/1/&hl=en &lr=&client=firefox-a&strip=1
Please mod me +5, too!
Welcome to the WWW. We have the ability to link any word in a body of text to a fucking definition, and /. article submitors are too damned lazy. It's extremely annoying that I had to read this far down in the comments to find out that Mambo is a CMS when a damned <span title="Mambo, the open source CMS" >Mambo</span> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mambo_(CMS)" >Mambo</a> would've given me (and everyone else) the information.
5 versions since the fork?? FIVE since mid-august? What the heck were they doing before they left? Nothing (except planning a fork!)
By the way, where's the money going over at Joomla.org? That's not a non-profit, you know...
I created a CMS from scratch almost a year ago as I needed it for a client's website I was developing (new to the business, you see). Since then it has seen seven implementations for different website and all seem pretty happy with it. It is fairly *ugly* to look at but very quick and capable. There are some upgrades I am going to make to it, but essentially it is a php/Mysql combo.
It is multi-user with different priviledges for each user environment and has unlimited depth/breadth functionality as it relies on a recursive database for content. I also throw in FCKEditor as a WYSIWIG so you don't need to know HTML at all to use the thing.
It seems to me it was easier to create my own than try to master 'Mambo' or whatever else is out there. I would figure the OSS types would be competent enough to design their own system.
Although I don't think it'll happen with me, at least. I'm discovering I really like Mambo and so far it does everything I want.
Hell, I was using a protected Wiki before I discovered Mambo.
+++ATH0
Yeah, or you could have read the fucking article, which says IN THE FIRST SENTENCE that Mambo is an open source CMS. Moron.