Miro transfers Mambo Copyright and Trademark to the Mambo Foundation
Monday, 22 August 2005

The Mambo Foundation has announced that Miro International, founder, copyright and trademark owner of Mambo Open Source, has begun the process of transferring the copyright and trademark of Mambo to the Mambo Foundation today. The agreement between Miro International and the Mambo Foundation is to transfer outright to the Mambo Foundation all of the intellectual property rights relating to Mambo.

Peter Lamont said, “Over the past few days, a few people in the community took the time to come to me directly to help me understand why it was so important that the Foundation should own Mambo’s copyright and trademark outright, and not just a license. Transferring the copyright was an easier decision to make now that there is a responsible structure to manage it.”

Miro’s original decision to keep the copyright and trademark ownership of Mambo was to safeguard the intellectual property for the community and not provide anyone an opportunity to exploit the project to their own advantage or benefits.

With the development team’s en masse resignations from the Mambo project, the Foundation is committed to recruiting members of the community who are currently active and have expressed interest in contributing further to the project, but may not previously have had the opportunity to serve in various leadership and team roles.

The Mambo Foundation will continue in its efforts to create an effective organisational structure for the community to thrive in. Much like the Mambo project itself, the Foundation has been established based on a vision which will organically evolve with time as the community provides constructive input on how to keep Mambo the best CMS in the open source arena.
Last Updated ( Monday, 22 August 2005 )

Mambo Open Source Development Team - Letter to the community

17 Aug 2005
Much has been said about the Mambo Open Source project and the establishment of the Mambo Foundation to benefit the future of Mambo.

We, the core development teams, unanimously believe:

* An open source project is about people producing free and open software and contributing to something as a team for the benefit of others.
* Open source projects reflect the spirit of collaboration and fun while garnering community feedback and providing good governance that allows for business to confidently invest in its development.
* Open source projects are open to the participation of anybody who can contribute value and is willing to work with the community.

We, the development team, have serious concerns about the Mambo Foundation and its relationship to the community. We believe the future of Mambo should be controlled by the demands of its users and the abilities of its developers. The Mambo Foundation is designed to grant that control to Miro, a design that makes cooperation between the Foundation and the community impossible.

* 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.

What we will do: We will continue to develop and improve a version of this award-winning software project currently released under the GNU General Public License. We wish Miro and the Mambo Foundation well and regret that we are not able to work with them.

We have retained the Software Freedom Law Center to advise us in this matter and will release more information about our short-term plan in the near future.

For more information please visit Open Source Matters

17 August 2005, The Mambo Development Team :

Andrew Eddie
Emir Sakic
Andy Miller
Rey Gigataras
Mitch Pirtle
Tim Broeker
Alex Kempkens
Arno Zijlstra
Jean-Marie Simonet
Levis Bisson
Andy Stewart
Peter Russell
Brad Baker
Brian Teeman
Michelle Bisson
Trijnie Wanders
Shayne Bartlett
Nick Annies
Johan Janssens

Since Miro hasn't been active in the community at all for some time now, it seems they are just trying to cash the latest success of the CMS at LinuxWorld SF.

At the moment all 'troops' are gathering at www.opensourcematters.org, where it has become clear that the future of the CMS is secured.
The majority, if not all, active community members support the core developers team in their decision and wish to release a first stable version of the new CMS, formerly known as Mambo.

LazyBadger wrote:
It's not revolution, it is civil war, where nobody is right.
You show greatly simplified picture...

Would the last person to leave please turn out the lights.

From other side, newMambo will lost suport of PR and marketing team from Miro's side

LazyBadger wrote:
I said only, that devteam will not be able resources of Miro (and Miro's money, BTW...), brand "Mambo"... and it's good for XOOPS, because new system will be less noise-generator

wtravel wrote:
The strength of Mambo being actively promoted by a commercial company was both its strenth and weakness. I think XOOPS definetely can learn from their promotional activities. This most of all requires manpower, XOOPS volunteers. We have a few in the marketing and communications team, but there is plenty of room for more enthusiastic XOOPSers who would like to help making XOOPS the most popular openSource CMS.

Good intentions alone are not enough. XOOPS needs people.