Forks, the Mambo Foundation, and Joomla!

Mambo has had a rather chequered history in recent times. Mambo was originally created by an Australian company, Miro,www.miro.com.au, and an open-source version was released in 2002, under the name of "Mambo Open Source". Since then, Mambo has continued to be developed by a group of developers from around the world.

In August 2005, the Mambo Foundation was set up by Miro to govern the future direction of the product. The purpose of this foundation is "to provide support and protection for the development of the Mambo software system" (www.mambo-foundation.org).

However, following the setup of the Mambo Foundation, many of the core developers resigned from the project, and began to work on a new product based on the existing codebase of Mambo. In the world of open source, such a new venture is called a "fork". (Remember we said that the GPL means that the code can't go away? Well this is exactly the kind of thing that can happen!) The new product the developers began work on later became Joomla! (www.joomla.org). Both Mambo and Joomla! continue to develop, with the developers of each system having different views on the direction of the respective products.

Whatever the cause of the split, Mambo is still going strong, with the August 2006 release of version 4.6 being the first major new release in over two years.