You can fork the code; you cannot fork the name

What the licence does and does not transfer

When the developers left Mambo in August 2005, they took something real with them: the code. The GNU General Public Licence under which Mambo was distributed guaranteed that any recipient of the software had the right to copy it, modify it, and redistribute it. That right was unconditional, attached to the code itself, and could not be revoked by Miro International, the Australian company that owned the Mambo trademark. The GPL is, among other things, a mechanism for ensuring that a community cannot be locked out of its own work simply because a corporation holds a copyright registration.

What the GPL does not transfer is a name. Trademark law operates on an entirely different logic from copyright. A trademark protects a brand — the association in the public mind between a word or symbol and a particular source of goods or services. It is not about the thing itself but about what the name signals. Miro International had registered "Mambo" as a trademark, which meant that even though every line of code could legally be copied, the word Mambo could not travel with the copy. The departing developers could not call their fork Mambo, could not produce software called Mambo, and could not represent their distribution as the continuation of Mambo — even if, in every technical sense, it was precisely that.

This is a distinction that trips up open-source communities repeatedly, and it tripped up the Mambo community in 2005 in a very specific way. The dispute that triggered the walkout was not about the code at all. It was about a plan to move the trademark into a new entity, the Mambo Foundation, in ways that the core development team believed would concentrate control rather than distribute it. The irony is that the governance failure was itself a trademark story. The code was already free; what was being contested was the name and what owning it would mean for the project's future direction.

Choosing a name as a public act

The core team, now operating under the newly incorporated Open Source Matters, needed a name quickly. They also made a deliberate choice about how to find one: publicly, by vote, with the reasoning visible. This was not merely practical — they were a distributed volunteer community without an obvious centre of authority — it was also a demonstration of the governance principles they were claiming to embody. A closed committee naming the project in private would have been a poor opening argument for a community that had just resigned over questions of transparency.

The name they chose came from a community vote and was drawn from the Swahili word jumla, meaning "all together." The naming process was itself a governance statement: it documented who was asked, how votes were counted, and why the chosen name was preferred. Joomla was announced in September 2005, roughly a month after the walkout, and the timeline matters — moving fast on a name was necessary because the project needed a public identity before the community fragmented.

Open Source Matters was created specifically to hold what the Mambo Foundation had been intended to hold: the trademark, the domain, the financial accounts, and the contractual relationships that a software project accumulates. The structural lesson drawn from the Mambo episode was explicit. A community that relies on a corporate parent or a loosely constituted foundation to hold its identity assets is a community that can be dispossessed. The Software Freedom Law Center was engaged to advise on the legal architecture, and their involvement was documented publicly — which is itself a governance practice worth noting. Outside counsel, cited by name, whose reasoning is on the record, is a different thing from an internal legal decision that the community is simply told about.

What a trademark actually requires

Registering a trademark is not a one-time act. It requires active maintenance: the mark must be used in commerce, renewals must be filed, and the holder must be willing to defend it against uses that would dilute its distinctiveness. Open Source Matters took on those obligations when it registered the Joomla trademark, and the consequence is that the project has had to make visible decisions about what uses are permitted and what uses are not.

The Joomla trademark policy — which has gone through several iterations over the years and is maintained publicly — governs things like whether a commercial agency can call itself a "Joomla" something, whether an extension can carry the name, and under what circumstances a third party can use the logo. These are not trivial questions. The extension economy that grew around the project generated a large number of businesses that were substantially dependent on the Joomla name for their own marketing, and the trademark holder has to decide how much latitude to grant without losing the ability to enforce the mark at all. Over-enforcement damages the community; under-enforcement can destroy the mark's legal standing.

Trademark law operates on an entirely different logic from copyright.

The 2005 episode also clarified something that communities sometimes learn only after the fact: forking a project does not automatically produce a community. Code is necessary but not sufficient. The Joomla founders inherited a large user base that followed the developers rather than the trademark — which is why Mambo's installed numbers fell and Joomla's rose — but that inheritance was itself contingent on speed, communication, and the credibility of the governance structures being put in place. Andrew Eddie was among the named signatories on the original announcement, and his documented long-term involvement in the project's technical direction is part of why that credibility held.

A fork that produces a new name is also producing a new identity that must be built from scratch in terms of reputation, search ranking, hosting relationships, and user trust. The one-click installers that drove adoption — Fantastico, Softaculous, and their equivalents on shared hosting panels — listed projects by name, not by licence. Getting listed required an identity, and an identity required a trademark. The governance decision to incorporate Open Source Matters and register Joomla as a trademark was therefore not a legal formality. It was the precondition for everything that followed.