zoomfactory.org

Two developers at one screen in an unlit office

The fork

The core team left in August 2005 and took the work with them

A governance dispute over who would hold the trademark ended with the lead developers walking out, forking the codebase, and founding a new project inside a week. The code was identical on day one.

August 2005, and what a fork actually takesLong read

Three things decided the rest of it.

  1. 01August 2005A walkout in the Australian winter
  2. 02jumlaSwahili for all together, picked by public vote
  3. 03the GPLThe licence that let the code leave while the name stayed behind

Three consequences of one decision

The fork settled ownership. Everything else came after.

  1. 01 Licensing

    Everything sellable had to stay GPL.

    Extensions load into a running Joomla process, so the project held they are derivative works.

    Whether an extension had to be GPL was the fight
  2. 02 Security

    The installed base set the blast radius.

    December 2015: an SQL injection, exploited widely, against sites nobody was updating.

    A 2015 SQL injection reached a very large number of sites
  3. 03 Comparison

    The same questions, answered three ways.

    Joomla, WordPress and Drupal share a stack and diverge on governance.

    WordPress, Drupal and Joomla answered the same questions differently

Who keeps this open

Forks, maintainers, directories.

Releases

One line, the year it split, and the two places it broke

Read left to right. The stem is Mambo. The branch is Joomla, and the two hatched gaps are the upgrades that required extension authors to rewrite — each of which cost the project sites that never came back.

AUGUST 2005 — THE FORK Joomla 1.0 shipped one month later. Twenty years on the yellow line. MAMBO Mambo, thinning out 1.0 1.5 4.0 5.x SEPTEMBER 2005 JANUARY 2008 AUGUST 2021 SINCE 2023 one month after the walkout three years in the open thirteen years later HARD BREAK 1.5 to 2.5 extensions rewritten HARD BREAK 3 to 4 rewritten again
A version history with two hard breaks

Six sections

Section 01 · 4 pieces

August 2005, and what a fork actually takes

The walkout, the trademark, and the name. Section 02 · 3 pieces

A version history with two hard breaks

1.0 to 5.x, and the migrations that hurt. Section 03 · 3 pieces

The directory is the product, in practice

Extensions, templates, and the one-click era. Section 04 · 3 pieces

Licensing decided what could be sold

The GPL argument, and encoded code. Section 05 · 3 pieces

Vulnerabilities are handled in public or not at all

The strike team, CVEs, and 2015. Section 06 · 3 pieces

The names on the decisions

Eddie, Landry, Teeman — and the comparison cases.

All nineteen pieces, in the archive

And the rest of the roll

Forks we follow.