Re: Announcing Mageia, a fork of Mandriva Linux

Dear all,

Frankly I'm a little bit skeptical about this move. From a practical point of 
view I don't see how the same team, that was fired from Mandriva SA for bad 
results (more than 30 million of Euros lost in 7 years) will mark a success with 
a "community" project.

As about the community, sincerely, where's the community? We've just came to 
hear/find about this news without being consulted before (you know, as a 
community). We've been put in front of the accomplished fact and then being 
asked if we step in or not? I think that this requires analysis and lot of 
thinking before answering.

Personally I'd like to continue the adventure, but:

1) Why "Mageia"? Did you ask the community about the fork and choosing together 
the name?

2) How do you plan that this "community" approach will work, when the same 
people with a "top down management" concept are back again at the head of this 
project? Community is about taking decisions after consulting with everybody, in 
a democratic way, for the good of the community. I didn't see that in the old 
Mandriva days, neither in the MUG days!

3) What are the chances of success of this project if the Mandriva SA will 
recover and became a success again? What "Mageia" will became then? Mandriva 
have now new finances and plan to move its main developpement in Russa and 
Brasil, more flexible and economically more attractive than in France. They will 
also choose the Red Hat model, with a commercial version and a community 
version.

I don't know about you all, maybe you've invested ten times much more effort in 
this distro than me, but all the work I've done to translate it in Romanian 
nearly costed me a divorce with my wife. I'm regarding more carefully right now 
before taking my decision.

But to be "community commited" till the end, I'll wait to see what Mandriva SA 
will do till December this year and then make my choice. For now I prefer to 
stay with Mandriva and, like the captain, to be the last person to abandon the 
ship. I still hope and wish for Mandriva SA to recover and came with a cutting 
edge product and a real community opening and attitude.

Best regards,
Florin Catalin RUSSEN
Romanian Translation Team



----- Original Message ----
From: Anssi Hannula <[email protected]>
To: Mandriva Experts <expert-4qZELD6FgxheH41UXmfQsti2O/[email protected]>; cooker-i18n-4qZELD6FgxheH41UXmfQsti2O/[email protected]
Sent: Sat, 18 September, 2010 18:41:14
Subject: [i18n] Announcing Mageia, a fork of Mandriva Linux

Hi all!

As Jerome already said on cooker@ list, a fork of Mandriva Linux is now being
created, named Mageia. Many people from the Mandriva community, including
former employees, are already on board.

Below is the announcement copied from http://mageia.org :

As you may have heard, the future of the Mandriva Linux distribution is
unclear.

Most employees working on the distribution were laid off when Edge-IT was
liquidated. We do not trust the plans of Mandriva SA anymore and we don't think
the company (or any company) is a safe host for such a project.

Many things have happened in the past 12 years. Some were very nice: the
Mandriva Linux community is quite large, motivated and experienced, the
distribution remains one of the most popular and an award-winning product, easy
to use and innovative. Some other events did have some really bad consequences
that made people not so confident in the viability of their favourite
distribution.

People working on it just do not want to be dependent on the economic
fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company.

** Forking Mandriva Linux? Yes.

Forking an existing open source project is never an easy decision to make, and
forking Mandriva Linux is a huge task.

It was not an impulsive decision. We all spoke a lot before: former employees,
Cooker contributors and users' communities. We collected opinions and reactions
in the past weeks as we needed to get some kind of global agreement and to
gather, before going ahead.

We believe a fork is the best solution and we have decided to create a new
distribution: Mageia.

** New grounds.

Mageia is a community project: it will not depend on the fate of a particular
company.

A not-for-profit organization will be set up in the coming days and it will be
managed by a board of community members. After the first year this board will
be regularly elected by committed community members.

This organization will manage and coordinate the distribution: code & software
hosting and distribution, build system, marketing, foster communication and
events. Data, facts, roadmaps, designs will be shared, discussed through this
organization.

We will discuss and lay down details in the coming days.

Mageia distribution will be what the board makes it to be, with the help and
contribution of the whole community. We already have ideas and plans for this
distribution; we want to:

  . make Linux and free software straightforward to use for everyone;

  . provide integrated system configuration tools;

  . keep a high-level of integration between the base system, the desktop
    (KDE/GNOME) and applications; especially improve third-parties (be it free 
of
    proprietary software) integration;

  . target new architectures and form-factors;

  . improve our understanding of computers and electronics devices users.

You certainly have your ideas too. We will take the time to share these.

** Community.

We understand the Mageia community as:

  . users,
  . makers (designers, developers, packagers, translators, testers, etc.),
  . advocates.

Those can be individuals, organizations, companies from all over the world.

There are challenges here; so many countries, so many languages, so many
cultures, so different needs. And that's great.

We've seen with the Mandriva Assembly experiment that it's not an easy task. We
believe we can make it better yet.

** People.

Whatever you do in life, people are your greatest and only true asset. And
Mageia aims to help people. Trust matters. We are only at the very beginning of
this fork. It won't be easy. But we believe it to be necessary.

    Ahmad Samir (ahmad78) - Mandriva contributor (bug triage team, packaging)
    Anne Nicolas (ennael) - former Mandriva employee (was packaging, release 
manager, community management)
    Anssi Hannula (Anssi) - Mandriva contributor (packaging, translations)
    Arnaud Patard (rtp) - former Mandriva employee (was kernel hacker)
    Christophe Fergeau (teuf) - former Mandriva employee (was urpmi, drakxtools, 
rpm, gcc, ...)
    Colin Guthrie (coling) - Mandriva contributor (Pulse Audio, packaging)
    Damien Lallement (dams) - former Mandriva employee (was QA manager)
    Erwan Velu - Mandriva contributor (packaging, hardware enabling)
    Félix Martos - Blogdrake admin
    Guillaume Rousse (guillomovitch) - Mandriva contributor (packaging, mirror 
tools)
    Jérôme Quelin (jq) - Mandriva contributor (Perl, packaging)
    Michael Scherer (misc) - Mandriva contributor (build system, Python, 
packaging)
    Nicolas Vigier (boklm) - former Mandriva employee (was working on build 
system, packaging, mandriva research projects)
    Olivier Blin (blino) - former Mandriva employee (was Drakxtools, installer, 
Perl, boot, ...)
    Olivier Mejean (goom) - French users community
    Olivier Thauvin (Nanar) - Mandriva contributor (packaging, mirrors)
    Pascal Vilarem (maat) - French users community
    Romain d'Alverny (rda) - former Mandriva employee (was information system 
manager)
    Séverine Wiltgen (sevalienor) - former Mandriva employee (was professional 
support, server stack)
    Thierry Vignaud (tv) - Former Mandriva employee and contributer (Drakxtools, 
installer, Perl, packaging)
    Thomas Backlund (tmb) - Mandriva contributor (kernel hacker, translations)
    Wolfgang Bornath (wobo) - German users community

For other contributors: if you want your name to be added to the list,
indicating that you plan to follow the fork, let us know on IRC channel, or by
email.  Next.

We are looking for many different things in the next days:

  . hardware for code hosting, build servers + datacenters to host these 
servers;
  . developers, contributors, translators, testers to invest into the 
development of Mageia;
  . counsels on building the organization and its processes, etc.

Your help and support will be very much appreciated.

-- 
Anssi Hannula