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News Audio/Video Mambo developers break ties with Miro
News Audio/Video Mambo developers break ties with Miro | Mambo developers break ties with Miro |
| Written by Gil Rutkowski | |
| Thursday, 18 August 2005 | |
Open Source vs. the Corporate AgendaThe core developers of the Mambo CMS have broken ties with Miro, the Mambo copyright holder.The split is centered on 'The Mambo Foundation' - a 'non-for-profit' formed to secure the future of Mambo. Unfortunately, when Miro decided to launch the foundation, they failed to include the core developers, 3rd party developers, or the Mambo community at large; the community that is responsible for making Mambo what it is today. In a letter to the community, the core developers unanimously expressed their concerns about the foundation and its detrimental effects on the project: "We, the development team, have serious concerns about the Mambo Foundation and its relationship to the community. We believe the future of Mambo should be controlled by the demands of its users and the abilities of its developers. The Mambo Foundation is designed to grant that control to Miro, a design that makes cooperation between the Foundation and the community impossible." They've also pledged their continued support for the CMS formerly known as Mambo with future versions to continue as planned: "What we will do: We will continue to develop and improve a version of this award-winning software project currently released under the GNU General Public License. We wish Miro and the Mambo Foundation well and regret that we are not able to work with them." As an active 3rd party developer, and the head of the Mambo 3PD Standards and Guidelines group, I found what I read on the Mambo Foundation website disturbing at the very least. Overall, it seems that Miro - a company that has contributed very little to the success of the project as a whole - is attempting to cash in on the recent success of the open source project. Although the foundation is setup as a non-for-profit, it has created a ridiculous membership structure that requires partners and 3rd party developers to pay astronomical annual fees as high as $50,000. The foundations Q&A section claims: Q – Do any of the directors or Miro profit from the foundation?
A - No. The Foundation is a non-profit organisation incorporated in Victoria, Australia. Well - of course Miro and the directors won't profit - but judging by the membership fee structure, they'll all be expecting to receive healthy salary for whatever, if any, duties they perform. Being a non-for-profit does not, in any way, stop the foundation from paying its employees and directors. Many in the community were truly taken by suprise by Miro, but a little research and with the help of the WaybackMachine, it seems that making money is the only motive Miro ever had with it's decision to make the Mambo project open source. "We put Mambo on Source Forge in order for people to help get the code 'straightened out' so that it could be re-released commercially. Anyone who helped out by contributing code could also do the same, providing they acknowledged where it came from. Meanwhile, we continued to work on the 3.0.5 release, providing bug fixes and patches." [via WaybackMachine archive of statements made on MamboServer] So, I guess the intent of Miro has been quite clear all along; but it's backfired. The community formerly known as the Mambo Community has joined together with the core developers at OpenSourceMatters.org in an amazing show of support for the continuation of the CMS without Miro. The moral of the story? Don't betray the community that supports you else the community will become the competition that ultimately defeats you. |
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 19 August 2005 ) |
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