Mambo in crisis

[ilox]

In case you hadn't heard, Mambo, one of the best Content Management Systems around (does my bias show?) has had a meltdown.

Miro, the company that started off Mambo and holds the copyright on the name, brought in The Mambo Foundation to oversee the development of the Mambo product. All seemed well until people found out just how different the rules and operation of the Foundation were going to be compared to the Open Source community that previously managed the project.

Some described the conditions as 'draconian'. The same time they announced the Foundation the 19 Developers, translation teams, documentation teams and many other longtime contributors walked away from the official project. They couldn't fit with NDA requirements and the loss of the ability to help with future directions unless their company was able to find US$50,000 per year to be a Strategic Member. Yep. Even to have a lesser membership for a company was US$1,000 a year. The big trick was, you could still be a developer for free but have no votes or insight into future development, not could you head any of the projects. Not only that, the Rules allow for the Board to decide how many votes each member could have so there never would be a level playing field, chances were that a strong financially-sound business could use its many votes to railroad the development into a direction that suited their corporate plans. That might not have happened but the opportunity was there.


So the Core Developers and many others (and me) walked to their new site at OpenSource Matters with their own discussion Forum.

Mambo as it stands at the moment is safe as far as being free for all to use, it is fully covered by the GPL. What is going to affect the future is that the product has 'forked'. That is, there are now two streams of development and chances are that as each stream releases new developments then the two streams will be moving further away from each other. This means that your favourite 3rd Party add-on might or might not work depending on which stream you and they are backing.

It is a shock that it came down to this but personally I think it was going to happen anyway. The business-driven goals of Miro just didn't gell with the OpenSource goals of many of the developers and users.

Mambo Foundation: http://mambo-foundation.org/

Open Source Matters: http://www.opensourcematters.org/

WARNING: The Foundation has just released what they are calling Mambo 4.5.3 BETA. This is NOT a BETA, this is a pre-Alpha CVS and it will more than likely break systems as it is completely unstable.

Do not try this code out on any system that requires stability and runs other functions. The ONLY current stable version of Mambo is 4.5.2.3 or older and that can be downloaded here or else here.