A foundation built to hold what the last one did not

What went wrong with the Mambo Foundation

The walkout was triggered by a governance proposal, not a technical disagreement. Miro International, the company behind Mambo, announced plans to establish a foundation that would hold the project's trademark and assets. The development team — including Andrew Eddie and Louis Landry — read the draft documents and concluded that the proposed structure would leave effective control with the company rather than the community. Their resignations were published, the reasoning was on record, and a fork became the only available response.

A fork under the GNU General Public License ↗ meant the code could travel. What it could not do was bring the name with it. "Mambo" belonged to Miro International as a trademark, and a trademark does not travel with a licence. The departing team needed a new name and, more critically, a new legal entity that would do the thing the Mambo Foundation had been designed to do — hold the assets on behalf of the community — but structured so that no single commercial entity could replicate the control problem that had just forced their hand.

Open Source Matters: the structural answer

Open Source Matters, Inc. was incorporated in the United States in 2005 as a non-profit specifically to hold the assets of what would become Joomla. The trademark, the domain names, the financial accounts — everything that had been the contested ground in the Mambo dispute — was vested in this organisation from the outset. The Software Freedom Law Center, which had become the reference body for exactly this kind of open-source legal architecture, was consulted during the process; its involvement gave the structure external credibility and grounded it in established precedent rather than improvised drafting.

The logic was explicit: the developers had not left Mambo because the code was bad. They had left because the governance structure concentrated consequential power in a way that the community could not check. Open Source Matters was the answer to that specific failure, designed so that the board was accountable to contributors and the trademark was owned by the organisation rather than by any company providing services around it.

The name Joomla — drawn from the Swahili jumla, meaning all together — was chosen by public vote, which was itself a governance statement. The naming process demonstrated that decisions would be made transparently and collectively, not announced by a corporate parent.

What the structure bound the project to

Incorporating as a non-profit with a defined remit created obligations as well as protections. Open Source Matters published its bylaws, held elections for leadership positions, and maintained the trademark through documented processes rather than informal authority. When the question of whether extensions had to be released under the GPL became contested — a prolonged argument about what counted as a derivative work — it was resolved partly through the published opinion of the Software Freedom Law Center, not by a company decision. That is what a governance structure built on public accountability looks like in practice.

A fork under the GNU General Public License meant the code could travel.

The arrangement was not frictionless. Internal disputes over board composition and voting procedures surfaced over the years, and the relationship between Open Source Matters and the wider contributor community required repeated renegotiation. But the foundational problem — a single commercial entity in a position to capture the project's assets — was structurally solved. The code, the name, and the money sat in an organisation whose governing documents were publicly available and whose leadership was elected.

That is what the Mambo walkout actually demanded: not just a new CMS, but a legal container that could be trusted to hold it.