The move is the culmination of a standoff between Miro and a team of volunteer coders earlier this year. The volunteers -- who have since forked the Mambo code to create the open source Joomla project -- had objected to Miro's decision not to transfer rights to the Mambo CMS to the newly created non-profit Mambo Foundation.
Miro's August reversal of that decision appears to have come to fruition, with the company saying as of today all rights had been legally transferred.
"Today Peter Lamont, CEO of Miro, signed a legal deed granting to the Mambo Foundation the rights and interests in the Mambo name, logo and associated trademarks," a statement from the company said.
The transfer of rights cost a nominal charge of one Australian dollar.
According to Miro, the rights transfer covers:
- "all Miro's right, title and interest in the Mambo trademarks and the Mambo copyright works"
- "the full benefit of the Mambo trademarks and the Mambo copyright works subject to any licenses previously granted (for example the GNU General Public Licence)"
- "all its rights against any third party in respect of the Mambo trademarks and Mambo copyright works, including all rights of suit and action and to damages, including damages for infringements predating this document"
Miro did not respond by the time of publication to a request to provide the legal deed for publication.
The Mambo CMS has been downloaded approximately five million times, Miro claimed in August, and the community at that time had around 40,000 users registered on its forums. Its competitor Joomla has released one major version and a subsequent four incremental upgrades since mid-September.
Makes no difference as this foundation is stacked with people from (or aligned with) Miro. A mere shifting of the deck chairs.
Additionally, the coding talent from (then) Mambo has long since moved on to the Joomla project; grounded in such way that the prior control issues never happen again.
Nobody in Joomla is looking back.
Andrew Smith
Brisbane, Australia