MESSAGE
| DATE | 2005-08-24 |
| FROM | From: "Inker, Evan"
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Open-source Mambo project faces rift
|
Open-source Mambo project faces rift
By Stephen Shankland
http://news.com.com/Open-source+Mambo+project+faces+rift/2100-7344_3-5841347
.html
Story last modified Mon Aug 22 11:28:00 PDT 2005
Backers of Mambo, a content management system used to publish Web sites, are
deeply divided over how to govern the open-source project--a split that
could send the software's development in two separate directions.
On one side of the clash is Miro International and the Mambo Foundation.
Miro is the company that originally released Mambo as open-source software,
and it helped establish the foundation earlier this month to govern the
software as an open-source project.
On the other side is the entire team of Mambo developers.
News.context
What's new:
Developers are breaking ranks with the foundation that oversees Mambo,
meaning that development of the content management software might fork into
two separate directions.
Bottom line:
The struggle over who steers development of the open-source software
underlines the promise and the pitfalls of collaborative work.
More stories on open-source development
The parties are wrestling over who should control the direction of Mambo's
evolution. It's not clear what the point of disagreement is, and the
developers declined to give details to CNET News.com. But from their public
statements, it appears their general claim is that the Mambo Foundation
amounts to a power grab and shuts them out.
"We believe the future of Mambo should be controlled by the demands of its
users and the abilities of its developers," reads a statement by
OpenSourceMatters, a group formed around the issue by about 20 key Mambo
developers. "The Mambo Foundation is designed to grant that control to Miro,
a design that makes cooperation between the foundation and the community
impossible...We, the community, have no voice in (the foundation's)
government or the future direction of Mambo."
Both sides have pledged to continue development of the Mambo software,
meaning that the project might well split--or "fork"--into two different
versions. The developer group insists Mambo development will be
unchanged--except that it will have a different name. On the other side, the
foundation says it's a good time to assemble a fresh team of contributors.
The possible fork shows both the promise and pitfalls of open-source
software. On the one hand, disgruntled engineers have the freedom to do what
they believe is right despite disagreements with corporate sponsors or other
programmers. On the other, such splits can dilute the efforts of programmers
and force software users to grapple with incompatible products.
"If people don't agree with the way a project is going, they have the
ability to strike off and produce something on their own. It really is a
Darwinian environment, where the best products will succeed," IDC analyst Al
Gillen said.
The drawback is that customers might get confused, if they're faced with a
range of competing products with similar roots, he said.
For their part, Miro and the foundation claim the power grab is in the other
direction. The idea of the foundation began with the developers themselves,
but Miro soon concluded that the developers' rationale for it "was to gain
control over the intellectual-property license, not protecting the project,"
foundation board member and Miro general manager Justina Phoon said in an
e-mail interview.
The criticism of Miro may have had some effect, though: The company on
Monday agreed to release some control over the Mambo intellectual property.
Miro founder Peter Lamont reversed his company's earlier position and
committed to transferring the Mambo trademark and copyright to the
foundation.
Mambo, governed by the General Public License, or GPL, is used to control
the content of Web pages. Numerous modules have been added, providing
features such as shopping carts, banner advertisements, customized maps and
chat forums. Miro, an Australian company that builds Mambo-based Web sites
and funds development of the software, released the once-proprietary product
as open-source software in 2000.
The developers departed this month, after Miro announced the Mambo
Foundation's formation at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Miro said
Mambo project leader Andrew Eddie, among others, was on the foundation's
board.
Fault lines soon appeared in exchanges on Mambo's discussion lists. The
biggest blow came Wednesday, when the Mambo development team, including
Eddie, who hadn't joined the foundation board after all, broke ranks with
Miro and the foundation.
The Miro contingent is choosing to see the glass as half full. Phoon said
that a new developer team for Mambo would have advantages.
"Changing development teams is always a setback, not something anyone would
typically look forward to," Phoon said. But "we do believe that the setback
will become a benefit, as we recruit new blood and build a Mambo team that
will focus on the core goals of Mambo, to be a high-quality, easy-to-use
content-management system."
The new structure means that members of the community who were unable to be
involved before can now join the team, Phoon said, adding that the
foundation is actively recruiting development team members as well as
organizational and third-party developer members.
And in the first place, Phoon said, the idea of the foundation came from
Eddie and fellow Mambo programmer and OpenSourceMatters signatory Brian
Teeman. When Miro concluded the developers just wanted control over the
license, they chose to go ahead with the
foundation and let programmers decide whether to join. "We felt once the
project was adequately protected, we could involve the core team and let
them decide if they were truly interested in the Mambo project, or simply
controlling the license," Phoon said.
To decide their next step, the developers are working with the Software
Freedom Law Center, an organization that employs Eben Moglen, a Columbia law
professor and legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation. Moglen
declined to comment on the situation.
Now each side argues that the other faces the decision to fork away from the
core project.
"Whether the OpenSourceMatters team forks the code, or anyone else forks the
code will be up to them," Phoon said. "If they are successful in meeting the
demands of their users, then another great project is in the market. If they
do not, they will be like thousands of other projects that get started and
abandoned."
But Emir Sakic, one of the Mambo developers, argues the momentum is behind
his group. "All members of the core development team, the translation teams
and documentation teams as well as most--if not all-- the third-party
developers and major players are on the new site," he said in an e-mail
interview. "This is not a question of fork, it is rather continuing the
project under another name."
Reconcilable differences
Not all open-source software forks become permanent. One case involves the
GNU Compiler Collection, or GCC, the crucial programming tools that are used
to produce nearly every open-source software package.
GCC was run by the Free Software Foundation--the group founded by Richard
Stallman to create the Gnu's Not Unix (GNU) operating system. But in 1997, a
company called Cygnus Solutions that commercialized GCC, along with several
allies, wanted to take GCC in new technical directions.
"We were extremely sensitive to the potential negatives of forking GCC,"
said Cygnus founder and now Red Hat employee Michael Tiemann. "At the same
time, Cygnus had reached a point due to our work on GCC that we were
beginning to feel hamstrung by the GCC maintainer. We needed to do things in
GCC that had never been contemplated when the original GCC was designed."
The Cygnus allies were cautious. They tried not to antagonize the FSF, they
established a governing committee to run the project, and they deliberately
named it the Experimental GNU Compiler System to avoid the perception they
were hijacking GCC itself. By 1999, after the EGCS approach had proved
itself, the Free Software Foundation joined forces.
"This fork was more done for technical reasons than for personal or
political reasons, and it proved far easier to heal," Tiemann said.
But there are many cases in which forks haven't reunited. The open-source
BSD operating system, which stemmed from work on Unix at the University of
California, Berkeley, has branched into FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
Other cases are up in the air. The Debian version of Linux has become the
foundation for several other versions, and many of the allies are now trying
to regroup through an effort called the Debian Common Core.
In the case of Mambo, a fork still isn't certain. Miro, for one, is holding
out hope.
The core Mambo developers presented their opposition Wednesday "before many
of them knew the facts behind the foundation," Phoon said. "Who knows what
will happen when they read the actual foundation documents and realize that
a lot of the fears they have been talking about were unfounded."
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