Re: Announcing Mageia, a fork of Mandriva Linux

On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 11:41 AM, Anssi Hannula wrote:
> 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
>
Count me in! Mandriva (the distro) quality work without Mandriva (the
company) level incompetencies.

Gireesh