Battleangel

What is all this about?

During the 2005 San Francisco LinuxWorld Expo, the CEO of Miro announced that he was forming a new non-profit organization called the Mambo Foundation. On the surface, such a maneuver seemed like noble idea for maintaining and ensuring the longevity of Mambo. The only problem with this announcement was that not a single core developer of Mambo was informed of these changes in advance. This thinly-veiled power play to gain more control over Mambo was not going to be tolerated by the developers. Consequently, all 19 members of the Mambo Development Team have formed a new website called OpenSourceMatters and posted a letter to the community regarding their “serious concerns about the Mambo Foundation and its relationship to the community.” The letter to the community cites the following:

The Mambo Foundation was formed without regard to the concerns of the core development teams. We, the community, have no voice in its government or the future direction of Mambo. The Mambo Steering Committee made up of development team and Miro representatives authorized incorporation of the Foundation and should form the first Board. Miro CEO Peter Lamont has taken it upon himself to incorporate the Foundation and appoint the Board without consulting the two development team representatives, Andrew Eddie and Brian Teeman.

Although Mr. Lamont through the MSC promised to transfer the Mambo copyright to the Foundation, Miro now refuses to do so.

With only joint control of the name “Mambo”, it appears that the Mambo name will be abandoned for something that can be fully trademarked. Fortunately for the developers of the CMS formerly known as Mambo, the code is still licensed under the GPL. (Unfortunately, this does preclude them from ever relicensing the code.) The other good news is that Eben Moglen and the Software Freedom Law Center team are advising the ex-Mambo Development Team with their near-term plans.

Mambo btw also won the “Best Open Source Solution” and “Best of Show” awards at the Linux World Expo 2005 in San Francisco, thus besting prominent names such as Mozilla Firefox.

I just wish they’d make the CMS a little more designer friendly. I’d think long and hard before ever making another Mambo site again. As far as I am concerned, the amalgamation of code (php) and design (table-based html) is an Achilles’ heel that the Mambo whatever-team must overcome if their software is ever going to hit big. It’s not a question of opinion. It’s a fact. If you have all the resources in the world, you can obviously re-write the source yourself, paint yourself into a corner. And also, an XML-RPC of some sort should be a prerequisite for any CMS. Thirdly, some sort of commenting system and real blog-like features need to be included.