Well, seems my inklin' of Miro's movements in the release of their Mambo 4.5.3 Beta were not unfounded, pilgrims...

Yes, they went on ahead and included a 3PD (third party developer) add-on into the core of their release. That is, they took the old dev team's work, made a few tweaks, and whacked in this snazzy MosCE editor to make it look purty. Sure, it's open source, but then the developer of this add-on had publicly stated he would not support Miro's Mambo...

So they went and stuck it in anyway, with nary a nod to the guy or even a wham bam thankye mam. Nuthin'. Zilch. Nada. Pretty much what we've come to expect from them varmits 'round these parts.

Meanwhile what did the developer, known as Happynoodleboy on the boards, have to say about this eventuatin' circumstance? Well, oddly, over the weekend when Miro released their Beta we heard not a peep from the pilgrim. Some of us were even thinkin' maybe those low-down no-good gang of Melburnian coffee swillers had put out some hired gun on the lad and we'd never hear from him again.

But never fear, pardners, the Happynoodleboy has surfaced today and he's agreed to have a chat here about his view on all this...

Welcome pardner, mosey on up to the fire and tell us a bit about yerself, how long ya'll have been usin' Mambo and what brought you to creatin' this MosCE gadget?

"I've been using Mambo for about 10 to 12 months now. I found it after looking for a CMS for my companies website, after getting a little frustrated with the likes of Postnuke and the MDPro fork. Mambo looked so professional and easy to use, and I figured it would fit the bill perfectly. I stll haven't created that site yet :), and to date the only Mambo website I've deployed is my own.

When I first started using Mambo, I was using the HTMLArea wysiwyg editor, but really liked the look of TinyMCE (it was visually appealing more than anything else I suppose, I wasn't really thinking about anything else, like performance, but it was easy to use). I noticed repeated calls for the ability to upload images from the frontend, which you couldn't do with TinyMCE, and which was 'disabled' in the free version of HTMLArea-XTD, so I thought I'd give it a go. I added more and more functionality, the Admin component, and eventually changed the name to mosCE cos there were quite a few users posting questions in the Moxiecode TinyMCE forums. I thought the name change would get rid of the confusion."

So where'd ya get to this past weekend that resulted in your disappearin' for the duration of this release?

"I don't actually have internet access at home, so I found all this out this morning from your initial e-mail. I read the thread in the OSM forum, but the thread was closed before I had a chance to participate in the discussion. I was working on the new mosCE most of this weekend by the way :)"

Surely it must have been quite a surprise comin' back and findin' your hard work included into the new Miro Mambo release, didja ever imagine such a thing?

"Yeah, sure. I don't want to make too big a deal out of it, I didn't cry or anything (I don't think I even swore). I just felt a little put out and dissapointed that something like this would happen. I've always wondered what would happen if someone decided to create a fork of mosCE, and I think that would be great, cos I wouldn't have to offer support for it, but in this instance, it looks like I'm expected to take on that load, without even being asked to do so. I would have appreciated the courtesy of being asked or informed, although I probably would have said no (with good reason)."

I noticed a few statements by yourself about only supportin' the original team's future development with MosCE, where do ya stand on this split between the core and them Miro varmits?

"I think this incident is a good indication of why. The reason a lot of people get involved in and enjoy being a part of Open Source communities like Mambo, or OSM, is because everyone is quite respectful of the development effort, and people go to great lengths to help each other out. There is no direct financial benefit for your effort and work, you do it because its fun, and cos its contributing to a greater something. Miro have forgotten that I think, or they never really bothered to consider it. I think their actions were also incredibly disrespectful of the core developers and the community, and smacked of the type exploitative capitalism I detest."

Have Miro changed anythin' in your release, or otherwise botched it in any way in their Beta?

"No, but they included an older version of the editor mambot, mosCE 1.0beta, and not the newer RC1. I think there were also a few files missing (no list view in the Image Manager), thats all I've noticed so far. They do now claim to be the original authors of some of the files, an example of manager.php (from the Image Manager) * @Original author $Author: mambofoundation $ and the same in the Advanced Link plugin in link.php."

I noticed a link to your site from the configurin' part of MosCE in the Miro release, have you had many queries since for support of what they included and how do you plan to deal with that?

"There have been a couple of posts in the forum, but I haven't had a chance today to see to them. I have since posted an article on my site saying that I won't support queries relating to the 'bundled' mosCE."

Open source is open source, anyone developin' it can expect others to make use of it, has this action from Miro changed the way yer thinkin' about future development?

"No, not really. I will carry on releasing it as LGPL, and eventually it will become dependant on the new CMS. Its just going to be difficult to support all the different users in the interim."

Do ya'll have anythin' to say to other developers out there who may be wonderin' if their creation could be the next sucked into the Miro development quicksand?

"I'm not sure if there is anything we can do about it. If there is a copyright violation I guess we could take it up with them, but the only way I know of to protect your work from them would be to licence it differently?"

Thanks for poppin' by for a chat, pardner, rightly glad you obliged to have your say here.

"My pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity and for bringing this all to my attention!"

There ya go folks, and that Happynoodleboy sure is a good natured pilgrim I must say, if the same had happened to me I don't need to tell ya I'd be out on the plains with guns blazin'.

Now, after bringin' this story and the MJJ Source story to light it's occurred to this ol' cowboy that perhaps ya'll out there may have pertinent stories to share as well on what's goin down in your part of the world since our humble community had it's foundations shook. So if ya'll would like to share with the rest of us anythin' at all, just leave a comment or send me a smoke signal.

I've heard rumour some of ya'll might have had the hard word put on ya by some of them varmits in the antipodean cafe scene, I'd rightly like to hear if this is true...

Till next time pilgrims,

The Lone Mamber