Mambo CMS, Mambo foundation and Miro Software

Dana Blankenhorn posted an article Who is representing Mambo? about current situation with Mambo content management system. There is a dispute between Miro Software, which created the original Mambo code, and its development team, has resulted in Miro placing the code with a foundation it created and the developers walking away from it.

And what does this say to the open source community at large? If a great project like Mambo can be split like this, it makes it that much more difficult for a business to trust its future to open source, any open source.

My guess is users will choose, in time, based on performance. Kwiecinski makes it sound like a freely competitive situation. "We’ll have two people doing the same thing, with the same code, in the same way, just under another name." But a year from now, or two, people will have to choose, and either way they go, they're going with an outfit that is smaller (when compared to proprietary competitors) than it would be otherwise. Why not just call Oracle?

Here is my comment: It's a normal situation with Open Source software that some developers want to create new project based of existing CMS. Postnuke CMS was based on PHP-Nuke. Plone was build on top of Zope and CMF. OscMax was based on OsCommerce. Not a big deal! If someone can organize a work of new community of developers the new project can appear.

Here is example of Nuke evolution (Postnuke, PHP-Nuke, Xaraya, Xoops):