It came about because the late Dr. James Cooke Brown, inventor of Loglan, tried to keep tight control over its development by claiming intellectual property rights over it. However, Brown did not move fast enough toward finalizing, formalizing and documenting the language to satisfy some of the enthusiastic and inventive community that had formed around it.
A group of those enthusiasts kept the basic concepts and syntax of Loglan (which they deemed not copyrightable) and created a new basic vocabulary to replace the words that Brown or the Loglan Institute could claim ownership of. (Reminiscent of the IP disputes over APIs versus implementations.) The result was Lojban, which continues to have a small community and a collection of translated documents and tutorials.
[0] https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan