With the split off from Mambo recently, the Joomla project has been gaining back a steady audience, but according to this new article from DevShed, there's a rather large fragmentation going on on the Mambo community, largely due to the Mambo Foundation being formed.

In San Francisco, the LinuxWorld 2005 Conference & Expo packaged both good and horrible news for the open source community that develops Mambo software, an extremely popular CMS (Content Management System) that web developers use as an easy interface to build websites. As for the good news, Mambo received their 2005 award for Best Open Source Solution.

That LinuxWorld announcement was on August 10th. Now, a month later, the dust has started to settle and we can see how things are panning out. Let’s take a look at what the new Mambo Foundation means to the community and for open source corporations in general.

They go through the early days of Mambo, looking at how it was formed and how the community around it was built up. They then move more into where the trouble started, the creation of the Mambo Foundation, apparently without a final consult of the lead developers of the project. And, through a series of bad choices, the head of the Foundation angers the developers even more, causing them to make the split. The result is Joomla, a CMS based on, but being developed separately from Mambo...