Losses at Mandriva

Actually, the level of work needed to maintain a large package pool has been causing a slow consolidation in the past years. We're no longer in the situation where every first-rank and second-rank distro is totally independant, and big packaging projects like Debian of Fedora now have several derivative projects gravitating around them.

UnitedLinux was an effort to set up a third gravity point, it failed first and foremost because of the SCO incident but one may wonder if going at it through business agreements was the right angle at all in the first place. Debian and Fedora succeeded by playing the community card.

OpenSuse is a new effort from Novell to set up this third point, it's not clear yet if it's succeeding or not.

Mandriva's current problems are largely due to the UnitedLinux explosion and its own failure to recognize the trend and become part of a larger alliance.

If you want to see actual Dark Ages stuff, you can look here
http://blogs.sun.com/mr/entry/modular_java_platform
Sun discovering in 2008 packages and automated dependency resolution may have some use.