NewsForge: Closing the Legal Briefcase on Mambo vs. Furthermore Copyright Dispute

“By now most of you have heard of the copyright infringement and
code theft claims involving the Mambo content management system and
businessman Brian Connolly. Legal questions have been raised,
guesses have been made, commentary has flowed forth, and all
involved in the dispute have had their 15 minutes to relay their
sad tales of injustice. Now it is time for the facts, and NewsForge
can definitively say that Connolly’s legal claims against the Mambo
community are baseless.

“Some background: Brian Connolly, co-founder of the Literati
Group, had paid Mambo developer Emir Sakic to customize Mambo OS
(in this instance, OS stands for open source, because there is a
closed-source version of Mambo called Mambo CMS) to look like a
newspaper. Part of this customization involved Sakic coding a text
block for the front page that would span the usual two-column news
listing. This lead story block involved little more than a colspan
HTML attribute inside of an otherwise standard table cell element
and a few lines of associated code to make it look somewhat
different…”

Complete
Story