Developers Fork Mandriva Linux, Creating Mageia

I wish the former Mandriva employees the best of luck. The Mandriva technical people/developers were always second to none IMHO; those running the business side were always the problem. Making the fork a not-for-profit, community distro seems to me what Mandriva always should have been. Mageia will definitely be one to watch with these excellent developers a the helm.

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At one time, I believe when it was still called Mandrake or at about the time of the name change, support from users was solicited by the company. By registering and contributing some cash they got access to a site where supposedly questions would be answered. If this model were used by the new group and unlike the company entity actually answered users' questions they would have some sustainable cash flow, provided this distribution still retains a significant number of users interested in its survival.

Me? I haven't used it in ages. Moreover, in my excperience answers came from other users and the company reps did not seem to be listening.

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Back when I was pretty unsettled within Linux, the beginning of 2004 I believe, I ran across a distribution called Conectiva. To me, it was the most polished and best distro that existed. I remember when hearing that it would be swallowed by Mandrakesoft to create Mandriva, I was a bit concerned. Every time I booted my computer, I felt like I was in the perfect environment...not only was the Conectiva distro stunningly beautiful, i was fast and offered me everything I wanted in my computing experience.

Mandriva wasn't bad...Fact is, when I migrated a mid-sized real estate company over to Linux I used mandriva because it was the only distro at the time that would natively support their huge Ricoh printers and copiers. That was a big, big deal...and it would have been a deal-breaker if their systems could not access or use their Ricoh devices.

I will watch this distro and see where it goes. I wasn't a big fan of Mandriva's business model, thusly I did not use it. It got to the point where I resented them poking and prodding me to "join" the community via a paid distro download. However, with a more unrestricted development staff, we may see this fork backtrack to the original ideas of Conectiva.

Hopefully anyway.

h

Interestingly enough Mandriva fired their developers in France and is hiring new ones in Brazil in the old Connectiva offices. I guess programmers are cheaper in Brazil.

Mandriva was 'bought' by Russia some time ago. I wouldn't be surprised if the intention is to merge with AltLinux. One of the goals was to create a Russian state OS, IIRC.

I wrote an article on that yesterday for O'Reilly. The sale was only announced last Friday. Prior to that NGI only had a 5% share in Mandriva. See: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/09/controlling-interest-in... From what I've read the intention is to compete with ALT Linux and ASPLinux, not merge with either of them.