I have stayed very quiet during the recent situation, choosing to correspond directly by email rather than in public forum, however now is the time for me to post publically.
My response to those still emailing me to comment on Miro's actions is still "No Comment".
However, my comments about the core teams actions....
I have given my full support to Andrew Eddie (And therefore the whole team) in making the very difficult and hard decision to make a stand and to make open source matter.
Those that have been with Mambo from the day one, the day when Miro pulled the Mambo code from Sourceforge and then appointed Robert Castley to take mambo forward will know the full story of Mambos success, that is, many people making an "ok" product into an award winning product that can beat the likes of Firefox in a fight. Andrew Eddie and the team are the real stars here and deserve all the Awards they get.
I personally feel people that have been in Mambo since day one, pleople like Emir, Andrew, Robert and a few others are the only people that really know the whole story, the history and the the issues involved. I too have been there since day one.
Others that do not have the full story, dont understand the relationship and history mambo and miro have and dont understand how opensource is not about wages and not about awards but that open source is a passion, will never understand how this situation appeared or some of the actions that were taken by the core team (or indeed by miro).
Mambo is free, GPL and will always be so, it is built by passion and not by the carrot of wages, its driven by feedback from the community and the skills of the core dev team, not by deadlines and project budgets.
I, as one who makes a financial full time living from custom solutions involving open source software at the same time as contributing hours of free time to the Mambo Core Code and in other free ways, have a huge vested interest in the success of the award winning software currently known as Mambo (Things like content rating, PDF's, Newsflash publishing, SEF and even mambots were either written by me or (in the case of mambots & SEF Urls) pushed to the forefront of development out of a need to have them for commercial customers.
Open source and Commercial services can work together and do work together in many places (Think about what opensource software runs your webserver, the internet DNS servers and think about the fact that that you probably pay for it somehow!)
I appreciate that the Core team at this time cannot say probably what they want to say publically - This I know is very frustrating, however I am sure the many kind works of community members worldwide is helping them get through this. So if you have not yet said something encouraging or supportive why not do it now, by email or PM, or in a forum. (Remember private encouragement is better than public praise - always)
As a public, and private, show of support to the cause of OSM, Blue Flame IT Ltd are pleased to announce that they will make a donation of AUS$1000.00 on request from the core dev team, in order to pay anything they need to pay.
We urge all other businesses and individuals to follow our example and pledge support, in fact to "put your money where your mouth is" (To coin an english expression)
"Open source software is an idea whose time has finally come. For twenty years it has been building momentum in the technical cultures that built the Internet and the World Wide Web. Now it's breaking out into the commercial world, and that's changing all the rules. Are you ready?" cite: http://www.opensource.org/
My reply:Hi Phil,
In light of these recent issues with Mambo/Miro and the ex-Mambo Core Development Team, will you be working with them on your components for sale with a new CMS, or continue with Mambo?
-William
I never had, nor ever will have any commercial arrangement with Miro. The only legal agreement between myself and Miro (And this is the same agreement the core team have ALL signed, to the best of my knowledge) is a "Joint Copyright Assignment by the Contributor" agreement.
I shall continue to develop services and products (both commercial and opensource - all available from my website at http://www.phil-taylor.com) that fulfil needs of the community, it seems, from what I read, the community will be using the Mambo version developed by the core dev team, what ever that will be called, (Besides, Miro have no developers now, do they?!)
What the community wants, they will get
