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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.
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?
At the Samba School:
The Penetrada: It makes sex look like church.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
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?
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
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.
"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
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."