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Open-source Mambo opts for central authority

Stephen Shankland Former Principal Writer
Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from 1998 to 2024 and wrote about processors, digital photography, AI, quantum computing, computer science, materials science, supercomputers, drones, browsers, 3D printing, USB, and new computing technology in general. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces. His first big scoop was about radioactive cat poop.
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Stephen Shankland

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.