Mageia - a Mandriva fork

hi list,

word is spreading fast: mandriva is being forked.

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.


thank you for reading this far, and hoping to see you follow us.
jérôme 
-- 
jquelin@gmail.com