philcrissman.com

If you aren’t aware of what Mambo is, it’s a PHP/MySQL-based CMS (Content Management System), and it’s the software that this site is built around. The Mambo CMS has won LinuxWorld awards two years running now (I think; someone can correct me, if they like).

And as of yesterday, the development team departed.

They departed from Miro, that is. There is a detailed story at NewsForge and discussion on Slashdot, but here’s the scoop in brief: the name “Mambo” is copyrighted to a corporation called Miro, who serves (served) as a sort of sponsor/business side of the Mambo CMS project. It’s an open source project, though, so the development team is volunteer; and when Miro recently decided to form a Mambo Foundation, without consulting or involving any of the developers, they (the developers) decided to discontinue the relationship.

So, the next release (by the dev team) will have a new name, and will likely continue to grow. I’m looking forward to it, and plan to upgrade my site to this new version when it’s available.

Project forks like this are possible in any open source project, but in large ones they are fairly rare; it seems to take a pretty big disagreement to cause a major split. XFree86’s license decision last year caused an almost instant shift to the x.org server in the linux distro world (if that made no sense to you, don’t worry; that probably means that you wouldn’t be interested ;-) ); technically, someone could even fork the linux kernel, and begin using it to develop an OS with a different name. No one is doing this because the Linux Kernel developers do such a great job that a fork like that would be counterproductive and would probably go nowhere.

In cases like this, the Miro/Mambo split, hopefully it’s clear that if you intend to work with a scattered team of volunteer developers, it’s a good idea to check out what they think before making major decisions, like forming a new foundation. ;-)