Saturday, August 27, 2005

Mambo and the problems of Open Source

Recently, trouble's been brewing in project Mambo.
Mambo source was originally developed by a company named Miro which chose to license the source under GPL, but retained copyright.
Conflcit arose over who controls the future of the project, the volunteer developers or the copyright owners.
An excellent outlines the developers' POV, and the developers website is OpenSourceMatters.

From the company's POV, however, I would think GPL-ing the source led to undesirable consequences. In short, once the source was GPLed, they lost all control over the future of the project - since the developers can (and did) fork the source, and continue development in the new fork.

While many hail this as a victory to the Open Source movemenet, which proved its supremecy over the corporation who developed the code, I am not so sure. This proves to be an incentive against corporations Open-Sourcing projects and cooperating with the OSS movement. OSS 'purists' would prefer it be that way, but as corporations do add value to projects, the OSS has lost many potential allies.

Tags: opensource mambo

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