Last week, Peter Russell was proudly reporting that Mambo, an open-source content management system, had beaten out Firefox for top honours at Linuxworld.

Exactly one week later, he and the other members of Mambo’s development team published an open letter announcing they had left the organization that controls Mambo. The move came in the wake of a restructuring that created a new foundation to direct the project’s future:

We, the development team, have serious concerns about the Mambo Foundation and its relationship to the community. We believe the future of Mambo should be controlled by the demands of its users and the abilities of its developers. The Mambo Foundation is designed to grant that control to Miro, a design that makes cooperation between the Foundation and the community impossible.

The developers conclude by promising to continue improving Mambo. (Although they don’t say it, their version will almost certainly need a new name for legal reasons. Let’s call it ChaCha for the purposes of this post.)

This puts the foundation in a difficult communications position. There will be a lot of natural sympathy in the developer community for the breakaway team; attacking them isn’t an option. At the same time, message boards are already alight with accusations against the foundation, and some kind of response is clearly called for.

The watchwords should be transparency, rapid response and directness, with a minimum of spin. To their credit, the foundation addresses the controversy on their FAQ page — albeit obliquely:

The previous development team is always free to take a copy of the Mambo source code to develop their own product. However, they will not be able to refer to their project as ‘Mambo’ or include the word Mambo in their project’s name, as the trademark is globally owned by Miro who has only granted its use to the Foundation.

But the FAQ stumbles on a few points — most notably the defensive tone of some of the answers.

Q – Who has been paying for all this?

A – Miro. People forget that Miro has always paid for everything to do with Mambo the beginning.

More fundamentally, there’s nothing on the foundation’s web site that confronts the key charge being levelled against the organization: that the foundation’s structure is stacked to allow Miro to dominate it. You can’t even find the names of the officers or directors.

And the tone of the conversation in Mambo’s official forums is telling. There’s enough anger to suggest that a little more consultation and notice could have gone a long way. Open-source communities have come to expect a high degree of engagement with those who write the software they use and chart its future course. Decision by fiat often goes down poorly.

(That anger is by no means unanimous, by the way. There are at least a few voices that express faith in the willingness of Mambo’s leadership to look out for users’ best interests.)

If you’re using Mambo, as I was until recently, this probably won’t have a big impact on you, although you may well have a decision to make in the coming months when the breakaway team releases ChaCha. Mambo has a large enough installed base, and a healthy enough third-party development community, to withstand this… although depending on how far ChaCha diverges from Mambo, they too may need to decide which version to support.

The most promising signs in this development are the good wishes that each side offers the other. With any luck, whatever hard feelings there are won’t linger long, and Mambo — which has languished with outdated technology while other CMSs have moved forward — will be spurred to innovate. Alternatively, ChaCha may well gain the initiative and offer an attactive option for Mambo’s users.

I hope Mambo and ChaCha thrive. In the past, Mambo’s creators have placed a strong and welcome emphasis on documenting the software and providing friendly, engaging, easy-to-use configuration tools. That focus on ease of use would serve both platforms (and users) well.

(With a bow to Jon Stahl, who reported on this first.)