Open-source Mambo opts for central authority
Mambo, an open-source software project that can handle content-management tasks such as online catalogs, has opted to govern itself with a single leader rather than its previous consensus-based approach.
The leader is Chad Auld, who has worked on the project for more than a year and who leads the core development team, the project said Monday.
"For the past year, Team Mambo has experimented with a consensus-based decision process. While that structure is certainly the most egalitarian, it has also led to extended discussion and decision cycles, and has proved to be less efficient than initially hoped," the project said. "In an effort to strengthen coordination of project resources and improve efficiencies in our development process, the decision has been made to shift global project management into more of a centralized structure."
In 2005, many of the open-source programmers who had supported Mambo were not happy with the project's corporate sponsors and governance. They "forked" the Mambo software into project into a separate project called Joomla.
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
