A Brew-Up in the OSCMS Arena
Those who have paid attention to me for a while (and I thank both of you) know my opinion of the Content Management System segment, commercial or open source. While nothing is excellent, or even good, for that matter, I did have hopes of one open source project, in particular, growing up to be something useful. And now we’ve got some ,um, interesting (in the chinese curse sense of the word) news on that front.
There’s been a major happening with Mambo, the CMS I’ve used on several projects. In a nutshell, the original owners of the code, Miro, decided to move control of the code into a foundation. Now this in itself isn’t a bad idea, and was, AFAICT supported by at least some members of the dev team.
But that’s where the story gets messy, children. Apparently Miro managed to alienate the entire development team along the way. While I’m tempted to put on my journalist hat and do a lot of “he said, she said” reportage on this, I’m going to restrain myself. I will limit myself to the observation that, as an outsider, it appeared to me that much more than just wrangling over a piece of code was going on. The reaction from all sides shouted out there were other issues, left unsaid, lurking behind it all, and backstage I could hear the sound of axes being ground. Several rumors have surfaced about the reasons behind the scene, and as usual none of them make their targets look especially good.
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