Whither Mandriva? [LWN.net]

By Jake Edge
April 18, 2012

The Mandriva distribution has suffered some serious blows over its lifetime. It has been in and out of bankruptcy, and has been, seemingly, perpetually on the brink of financial collapse over the last six years or more. Much of the community has moved on to the Mageia fork, but Mandriva still seems to limp along. How long that will continue at this point is anyone's guess.

The current status of Mandriva is a bit mysterious for a number of different reasons. In a blog post, Mandriva S.A. COO Jean-Manuel Croset notes that the company has been uncommunicative for "the last few months" without much of an explanation why. His post addresses the Mandriva community and is looking for input about where the distribution should be heading:

So, time has arrived to talk to our supporters, users, contributors and fans. I’m very interested to hear about your background, motivations, expectations and needs. I can’t promise to fulfill every of them, but I’m ready to read and listen and will certainly take them into account for the future.

Croset mentions that there is a shareholders meeting for Mandriva S.A. on April 30, where strategy and priorities for the next year will be decided. Presumably, his outreach to the community is focused on helping the company make those decisions.

In the meantime, though, it would seem that progress on the distribution has stalled. Some developers have moved to ROSA, which is a Russia-based company that is building a desktop distribution (ROSA Marathon 2012) atop Mandriva. For a while, it seems, ROSA was working within the Mandriva community but has more recently moved on. Much of that information comes from a thread on the Mandriva cooker mailing list—Cooker is the name of Mandriva's development distribution, like Fedora's Rawhide.

That thread, which was started by longtime Mandriva developer Per Øyvind Karlsen is unfortunately—perhaps mistakenly—marked as "not to be archived" (i.e. X-No-Archive: yes). The thread started on the closed maintainers mailing list, but Karlsen copied the cooker list because he wanted the topic to be more widely discussed. The flag on the posts means that Gmane, Google, and others will expire them soon, effectively purging them from the internet. So we won't be quoting from or linking to those posts, in keeping with the intent of the flag, but can at least summarize the discussion.

Karlsen is concerned that the Mandriva distribution is dying because the parent company has financial problems and because there has never been a neutral foundation set up to shepherd the distribution. Until recently, ROSA was working closely with Mandriva S.A., but that has ended because of some dispute between the two companies, he said. Meanwhile, Karlsen stopped working for Mandriva S.A. in November and has gone to work for ROSA. It is his belief that the distribution will disappear without a foundation behind it.

Dmitry Komissarov said that ROSA could support a Mandriva foundation, but that the main problems were the need for that foundation to receive the trademark as well as the need for a project leader to be identified. There were suggestions that one of the driving forces behind Mageia, Anne Nicolas, might make a good leader for the project or foundation, but that was questioned by others including Karlsen. The problem of the trademarks may be stickier, as it would seem that Mandriva S.A. is not necessarily interested in handing them over to some kind of independent organization.

Andrey Bondrov sees a schism between the ROSA developers and the Cooker team that is likely to effectively kill off Mandriva. From his perspective, ROSA is headed in a direction very different from the way Mandriva operates (in terms of its desktop focus, in particular). Komissarov disputed much of what Bondrov said, noting that ROSA had talked about making some of the changes, but had not acted on them, at least yet.

Suggestions that folks interested in Cooker move to Mageia were mostly met with disagreement. Various people feel that they have a lot invested in Cooker (and Mandriva) and are not willing to make a switch. The overall impression one gets by reading the thread is that there is a lot of confusion in the Mandriva community about what to do and how to go about doing it.

In many ways, the problem boils down to a distribution that has (or had) an active community, but was still driven by a company (and, importantly, that company's money). Now that the money has largely dried up, the community is somewhat adrift at this point. Because only the trademark holder can actually release a distribution called "Mandriva", the community is to some extent held hostage to the (as yet unknown) plans of Mandriva S.A.

According to a blog post by the founder of Mandrake Linux (Mandriva's predecessor), Gaël Duval, the idea of a foundation has been discussed since 2000 or 2001. He notes that he has not been involved in Mandriva since 2006, but he believes that a distribution-focused foundation would be a boon both for Mandriva itself, and for the public at large. He suggests an "OS in the Public Interest" as a possible future for Mandriva noting that Debian is for "servers & geeks" and Ubuntu is held by Canonical. Because of Mandriva's focus on the desktop, a public-interest OS based on it could serve as a way to break the proprietary stranglehold on the desktop, Duval said.

Any kind of movement in that direction requires assistance from Mandriva S.A., of course. It isn't clear what prompted Croset to ask the community for input recently and the silence from the company over the last few months has certainly worried many in the community. The crux of Croset's message: "For the time being and in short: trust us." may not really alleviate those concerns.

Mageia, on the other hand, seems to be thriving. It has just released the third beta of Mageia 2, and the final release is currently scheduled for May 15. It would seem that some part of the Mandriva community was able to move on. Given that Mandriva is based free software, all that really needed to be done was to pick a new name, set up some infrastructure, and start working on releases. Since Mageia has its own name, it was able to set up a non-profit association to govern the distribution as well.

While it is understandable that some feel strong ties to the Mandriva name, the murky future for the company makes those ties somewhat risky. As Duval notes, at one point Mandrake Linux was available in stores all over the world, and he says that he often hears from people who started their Linux experience using Mandrake. Since that time—and after a trademark dispute caused the name to change—Mandriva has had lots of ups and downs, but its users are often fiercely loyal. If the current financial problems for Mandriva S.A. mean the end of the distribution, that would be a sad outcome.

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Whither Mandriva?

Posted Apr 25, 2012 18:28 UTC (Wed) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]

Incorrect, we've invested tons of work not only in RPM, but also in KDE, deprecation of legacy perl tools with migration of python in process, have tons of actual R&D in place (compared to Mageia which has pretty much none as historically all of such was mostly conducted by Mandriva employees), only to mention a few things..

There's also the lesser known, but crucial fact that laid the premise of Mageia, which wasn't actually that all people at Edge-IT was fired (which again has a totally different meaning, implying that they were terminated against their will based on misconduct on their part), only two people in engineering wasn't offered a new contract with Mandriva during the liquidation, one of those were the director of engineering (which obviously wasn't offered a new contract due to any redundancies considering the position..), namely Anne Nicolas, who up untill then had been one of the only two people in the company that opposed the idea of a foundation and effectively blocked it, due to her position as project leader. Most of the other employees declined the new contract offered due to this and decided to go with her in secretly forking the distribution and conducting in what probably could be considered as pretty strong disloyalty and destructive behaviours towards the company to pave the way for when to announce their project.
So Mageia wasn't ever founded based on the fear, distrust and dissatisfaction within the community, but rather about a few individuals who felt it important to remain in control of it (considering how open the cooker community has been, it's not like they'd have any problems doing what they want within the distribution regardless of employment) and creating grounds for creating their own new company, Hupstream..

Due to these facts, the remaining people at Mandriva has in general a very strong distaste for and not particularly willing to be working with, or certainly at least not working with Anne as a project leader again, as her success at Mandriva wasn't really there and the only people actually having good relations with her being some of the people in engineering at Edge-IT and their social circle in Paris, which again formed a cliqué that became the bottleneck of the distribution and community.

One should notice the *complete* lack of ie. Conectiva people who actually went to be involved with Mageia, there's a reason for it..

So this is probably the biggest issue for us to even consider rebasing on Mageia and participating in a project under people they simply don't trust or have any respect left for.

This again of course sounds like pure slander from someone disgruntled from anyone with the bias against Mandriva, consider it whatever you'd like, but for me it's rather about finally stating in public about some truths that never has been brought attention to and that people at "our camp" simply has too much politeness and professionalism to go on nagging about in public, even despite it being well-known within the company.

For collaboration with Mageia, sharing efforts, inviting them to participate in a bigger foundation with serious commercial backing and such would certainly be welcome and to everyone's interest, but it's simply unrealistic and something few of "us" would be willing to accept if it were lead by people one simply doesn't trust.

Whither Mandriva?

Posted Apr 26, 2012 21:07 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

Loads of people were let go at Mandriva. Furthermore, lots of people had been let go at that time. There was a real warning message that Mandriva might go bankrupt. It still feels like Mandriva is about to go bankrupt.

Criticizing people for choosing their own way: If you treat your employees like above and lots of uncertainty, I don't think you're allowed to criticize.

FWIW: I've been a Mandriva user for when it was still called Mandrake. Running Cooker for ages. Still biased, because only at Mageia I felt the "hey, let's contribute" atmosphere.

Whither Mandriva?

Posted Apr 26, 2012 21:52 UTC (Thu) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]

At the time of what I referred to and criticized, there wasn't anything suggesting this at all, given the fact that Mandriva had just been saved by the new Russian investors, and that there was a general assembly taking place on a friday, the day before Mageia being announced on a Satuday, where they knowingly of it's outcome and news to be published about it, made maliciously false claims about Mandriva's future and claims about it going out of businiss within the next weeks right before the news from the general assembly was made public on the following Sunday which more than dismissed this false claim.

And no, not lots of people had to be let go, noone at Conectiva was let go of, and for in Paris, almost every person who left, did this by declining the contract offer to continue working for Mandriva after Edge-IT liquidation, not due to actually being let go against their will (Anne even was offered a new contract by Komissaov, but then declined as they already had made their own plans..).

Please reread my comment again, and for the record, I'm not criticizing, I'm disclosing facts previously hidden and also I'm more judging than criticizing, with every right to do so, as I was there and have true insight on the turn of events that took place.

But I'm not intending to go much further into details about this, as it touches more sensitive issues concerning peoples' former employment and also implicates those being mentioned..

Whither Mandriva?

Posted Apr 28, 2012 16:09 UTC (Sat) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]

The new contract, which had same or better terms and salaries?

Whither Mandriva?

Posted May 1, 2012 17:20 UTC (Tue) by boklm (subscriber, #34568) [Link]

For information, proyvind was not working for Mandriva or Edge-it at the time, and was not involved in this at all.

About this "new contract" proyvind keep talking about, for me there were various reasons to refuse a new contract :
- Their plan was to move all Mandriva debts to Edge-IT, and close Edge-IT to get rid of the debts. I'm not sure about the legality of this, and didn't really want to be involved in something like this.
- Edge-IT was already in the process of closing when they made a proposal to some of us (and only to a few people which is I think not legal according to french laws). I don't think it would have been legally possible to change contract at this point in time when the process of closing Edge-IT was started and not finished.
- the proposal they made to some of us was something like this: you sign an Edge-IT resignation letter 1 month in the past (before the process of closing Edge-IT was started), and a Mandriva contract also 1 month in the past. I don't think signing papers dated in the past is legal.
- for various reasons that I will not take the time to explain here I didn't trust those people, and knew that I didn't want to work with those people after seeing how they managed the company in the past months
- I was not convinced at all by what they agreed to tell us about their plans
- mandriva employees were still not getting they salary paid in time so signing a new contract there seemed a little risky
- in France, in case of economic layoff, you get some money, and can continue to be paid for some time while unemployed, so I though it was much better to wait until the end of Edge-IT which was coming soon, and then spend some time to think about what to do next.

And I can add that they decided alone to fire all edge-it people, didn't discuss this with people before it was done, and when asking questions about future of the company we were explained a few times that it's not our business to think about this. So it's not really surprising that people refused to sign a new contract.

I will not take the time to correct all the other "facts", but they are equally wrong.

Whither Mandriva?

Posted May 1, 2012 18:57 UTC (Tue) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]

Now that doesn't sound shady at all... *cough*

Sounds like the right choice to get out of there.

he who shalt meth with rogues...

Posted Apr 26, 2012 22:54 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

I do hope Conectiva folks will know the better way to cope with this mess.

Just in case, Eugene Sokolov of ROSA publicly named them "brasils we have" (sounds pretty derogatory in Russian; see a record of 22 Октября, 2011 - 13:46) -- I have that archived just in case since the site is run by one of Reiman's gang members, incidentally.

By the way, you personally might be interested in that comment as it illustrates quite a bit of ROSA's PR and public deception strategy...

he who shalt meth with rogues...

Posted Apr 26, 2012 23:43 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

That's not a derogatory term, just an informal contraction. And the whole sentence can be translated "We have Brasilians, Frenchmen, ... working with us".

Certainly not "brasils we have".

he who shalt meth with rogues...

Posted Apr 27, 2012 21:59 UTC (Fri) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

Russian is native to me and while I definitely can't read Eugene's lips the overall tone reminded me of "niggaz". The references to Frenchmen happened to be even more harsh though, and I'm not surprised seeing the sort of abusive treatment those not playing along have "earned" there.

Heck, they can't even fulfil what they promise to pay for the job done.

he who shalt meth with rogues...

Posted Apr 27, 2012 22:28 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I'm a native Russian, and this doesn't sound insulting for me. It's one of usual contractions that happen in informal speech.

For example, "kazakhstantsi" ("Kazakhstanians") -> "kazahi" follows the same route.

he who shalt meth with rogueth...

Posted May 29, 2012 7:04 UTC (Tue) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

Sorry, I've been to Kazakhstan quite a few times (see wallpapers-mike package in ALT Linux for some proof) and the analogy you give just doesn't hold: the word "kazakhstantsi" is virtually missing in circulation while the nation is referred to as "kazakhi" for a long long time.

If you please, the logical direction is rather the opposite: "stan" means "land", and "kazakh""stan" means "kazakhi's land".

And it still sounds as insulting as Zhyndy Batyr to me. :)

he who shalt meth with rogues...

Posted Apr 27, 2012 1:30 UTC (Fri) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]

It's interesting how someone involved with a company that is 100% owned by the former marketing manager of a furniture company, now the current Russian minister of defence, and also amongst these "gang members"* you refer to is able to make such a great degree of fuzz and noise about a former minister of communication for having a 51% share in it's major competing company..

For your deceptive mistranslation, google translates presents me with an entirely different picture from that I actually know based on real insight, as I'm actually personally involved and even mentioned in what you try manipulate the more unbiased translation:
"We have dozens of brazil, the French, Swedes (Oden Eriksson), Norwegian (Per Ovynd, Eskild), Germans (Sebastian Trug), Americans (Jeff Johnson).

All heads of R & D DEW lot of talk and write in English."

For relations of Conectiva with the Edge-IT team, a more interesting quote from one of theirs is worth mentioning:
"00:27 <XXX> I don't know, internal paris office relationship was good, but their relationship to conectiva was like colonialism sometimes from some of them.. e.g., "we are the white people, you brazilian monkeys just work" :("

* http://www.rumafia.com/person.php?id=146

he who shalt meth with rogues...

Posted Apr 27, 2012 22:11 UTC (Fri) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

There are different gangs pretty anywhere money is involved with but it'd be interesting to learn of that 100% number you gave -- whom did you refer to? :)

Re translation, I am a professional interpreter (think a bit more so than google translate) and stand by my words. I should have cited the whole phrase, ack; still it was pretty late in the night already, sorry.

The bit that I offered to you personally was a public statement that DEW's heads "lot of talk and write in English" in spite of you complaining of them taking the discussions away into Russian-speaking places: my point is that this particular "a lot" obviously doesn't sit well enough with the existing team while being touted as an achievement.

For the record, I criticized (and to some extent derailed having somewhat higher level of English knowledge) attempts by a few folks to push English in devel@altlinux *exactly* for "cultural space" reasons: language isn't the thing to fool around with, in short.

And I still wish luck to Mandriva, but obviously not to the raiders.

he who shalt meth with rogues...

Posted Apr 27, 2012 23:54 UTC (Fri) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]

Well, I guess I misread the actual size of stake Rostekhnologii acquired in Alt Linux back in 2010, but it's still not something that makes the point moot..

Anyways, I can't remember you ever not conducting your Komissarv/ROSA vendetta in any thread I see you post to, this is just getting sad and pathetic, no matter how right and justified you might've even been initially, you're just making yourself look like a compulsive, sad person.
Especially when you manipulate things that Eugene Sokolov (which I know personally, and that I can vouche for that would never ever imply such a thing as you accuse him of) in such a fashion, that's just mean and spiteful. Eugene Sokolov is a great and very friendly guy who certainly doesn't deserve the level of trashtalk and accusations you throw at him.

Get something better to do, I don't think anyone ever cares (except for rolling their eyes, and probably getting really tired) about what you keep repetetively write on and on about the same topics whenever you get the chance, regardless of how off-topic it is and how you completely disregard the actual discussions, articles, threads and what not you pollute with your trolling.
This is getting old, you know better, and have better skills and better thing to do.
For what it's worth, I fully respect you, but not this behaviour of yours and it's really making you look like a much more obsessive and deranged person than that I know you really are.

If you want to keep on with this stuff, do it somewhere else where we don't have to listen to it, we have no interest in getting involved in your political feuds with people that most often doesn't directly concern us, but surely your approach is something that we do start to find offensive and slanderous, for which we simply don't think should be the target of..

don't get me wrong but vendetta is a correct term indeed

Posted May 29, 2012 7:21 UTC (Tue) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

> but it's still not something that makes the point moot..
It actually does since you implied the decision makers wrongly (if I got you right of course).

Re vendetta, let me see you sit down looking at someone trying to destroy your family. These bastards have taken over the Russian school project in its coutry-wide deployment phase and have failed it horribly doing LOTS of damage to teachers and making lots of them hostile to free software pushed down their throats with no sane support.

These people also tried to steal team members and technology behind our backs -- heck, I personally gave advice on build system to Denis Koryavov since I trusted him and he didn't tell that he works for Komissarov already knowing that I wouldn't support him then.

It's about doing wrong things and spreading lies. And by defending liars you won't gain anything as a honest person (which you are as far as I can tell from our conversations and Jeff's recommendation).

You won't stop me. FYI, Komissarov tried and I know it; but he failed altogether. And *please* do understand that I actually waited for too long before digging out the battle axe in the hopes of their sanity.

But it won't concern only me, when one starts doing wrong it's ever harder to stop. Wish they don't manage to hurt you as much, but look out either.

Good luck Per, and God bless you.

he who shalt meth with rogues...

Posted May 29, 2012 20:35 UTC (Tue) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

PS: I'll take your word on Eugene's intent (or the lack thereof).

Whither Mandriva?

Posted May 2, 2012 11:31 UTC (Wed) by buchanmilne (guest, #42315) [Link]

Incorrect

I have read the post you replied to a number of times, and I can't identify which parts you are actually replying to, any that are factually incorrect, or any that are slanderous. Maybe I am just feeding a drunk troll, but I think I should at least debunk your statements.

we've invested tons of work not only in RPM,

What has been the return on that investment? I mean besides some incompatibility with all important RPM-based distros, and breaking many packages (causing a lot of unncessary work) in working towards the seemingly singular goal of having the cleanest RPM spec files, regardless of anything that might be lost in the process.

but also in KDE, deprecation of legacy perl tools with migration of python in process, have tons of actual R&D in place (compared to Mageia which has pretty much none as historically all of such was mostly conducted by Mandriva employees), only to mention a few things.

So that is why patches to the Mandriva perl tools are being imported from Mageia?

Granted, there needs to be more innovation in Mageia, but there is a lot of work just cleaning up infrastructure-type issues, and plain bug fixing (and keeping up with other developments). These have been the focus until now, but I think after the release of Mageia 2, there will probably be more opportunity for technical innovation.

There's also the lesser known, but crucial fact that laid the premise of Mageia,

You know yourself that some kind of open governance has been years overdue. Both before and after Anne's involvement in Mandriva, Mandriva has had the opportunity to address this. I don't care what the catalyst was, but in Mageia Mandriva users now have a sustainable openly governed distribution to migrate to, that is attempting to maintain and improve the good parts of what was Mandriva.

So far, it seems to be working.

Unfortunately, from my viewpoint, it looks like the community participation at Mandriva is in decline. For example, as a maintainer of a number of packages in the "main" distribution, I don't have any idea of the time lines for 2012 development, nor any idea on what is on the roadmap for 2012 and how I can contribute to that.

On the other hand, Mageia has a schedule (which has mainly been kept, though RC and final release have slipped to accommodate a 3rd beta) and some specs.

I think you can see why at this stage I am prioritising Mageia work over Mandriva work (although I do try and keep them in sync as much as possible).

This again of course sounds like pure slander from someone disgruntled from anyone with the bias against Mandriva,

Hmm, I am still spending some time contributing to Mandriva, and you say the text you are replying to constitutes slander and disgruntlement, and bias against Mandriva? I can't comprehend how you arrive at that conclusion.

For collaboration with Mageia, sharing efforts, inviting them to participate in a bigger foundation with serious commercial backing and such would certainly be welcome and to everyone's interest, but it's simply unrealistic and something few of "us" would be willing to accept if it were lead by people one simply doesn't trust.

Mageia is an openly governed distribution. The fact that Mandriva/Rosa etc. is not prepared to engage with Mageia at all over personal issues seems more of a problem for Mandriva/Rosa than for Mageia.

Whither Mandriva?

Posted May 9, 2012 17:04 UTC (Wed) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]

>> Incorrect
> I have read the post you replied to a number of times, and I can't identify which parts you are actually replying to, any that are factually incorrect, or any that are slanderous. Maybe I am just feeding a drunk troll, but I think I should at least debunk your statements.

>> we've invested tons of work not only in RPM,
> What has been the return on that investment? I mean besides some incompatibility with all important RPM-based distros, and breaking many packages (causing a lot of unncessary work) in working towards the seemingly singular goal of having the cleanest RPM spec files, regardless of anything that might be lost in the process.
There's been lots of returns, but of course, it's come at the heaviest cost of often by breaking some legacy compatibility, but in order to move forwards in a rather messy environment where little innovation has really taken place for a while, nor much great deal of efforts has been conducted in improving the situation (especially not the historical, and the ghost that's forever haunted rpm and been used, although often misattributed to 'apt-get', fragmentation!) has been done by others (and by that, I refer to others in terms of rpm development, independent of which distributions).
It's a price worth paying for the long term, and the work is taking place in an upstream project we're actively involved with and have several developers actively working on, either through employment, or voluntarily through community, which you can follow at ie.: http://rpm5.org/cvs/fileview?f=rpm/CHANGES&v=1.3501.2...

>but also in KDE, deprecation of legacy perl tools with migration of python in process, have tons of actual R&D in place (compared to Mageia which has pretty much none as historically all of such was mostly conducted by Mandriva employees), only to mention a few things.
> So that is why patches to the Mandriva perl tools are being imported from Mageia?
"deprecation of legacy perl tools" kinda more than implies main focus being on other parts than on the perl tools Mageia still also maintains, with no currently known plans of otherwise for the future..
If you're criticizing the obviously beneficial and sane practice of actively merging changes from Mageia (and their mostly lack of interest in picking up much from us), well, it's not something I think we're to be critized or anything for in itself..

> Granted, there needs to be more innovation in Mageia, but there is a lot of work just cleaning up infrastructure-type issues, and plain bug fixing (and keeping up with other developments). These have been the focus until now, but I think after the release of Mageia 2, there will probably be more opportunity for technical innovation.
Yupp, you know, similarly can be said for ie. all the work I've invested in working on rpm full-time for a good while now..

>> There's also the lesser known, but crucial fact that laid the premise of Mageia,
>You know yourself that some kind of open governance has been years overdue. Both before and after Anne's involvement in Mandriva, Mandriva has had the opportunity to address this. I don't care what the catalyst was, but in Mageia Mandriva users now have a sustainable openly governed distribution to migrate to, that is attempting to maintain and improve the good parts of what was Mandriva.
> So far, it seems to be working.
Of course it was obvious, yet there was no interest in this from the same crowd (ie. more referring to the hupstream employees/ mageia founders, which 4/5 employees from takes up 4/6 seats on the board of Mageia, for which only Romain showed some great interest in back in 2007, just before leaving, but then none since his return a year or two later..) at Mandriva when I tried actively pushing the issue since 2007..

> Unfortunately, from my viewpoint, it looks like the community participation at Mandriva is in decline. For example, as a maintainer of a number of packages in the "main" distribution, I don't have any idea of the time lines for 2012 development, nor any idea on what is on the roadmap for 2012 and how I can contribute to that.
Of course, that's more than obvious, and pretty much makes up for the very essence and topic of this article, for which the posts and discussions conducted by myself and others are pretty much what it's made out of.
What is not clear? In my post referred to, I even gave my ultimatum about the situation improving or I'm leaving, should be pretty easy enough to understand, no? ;)

> On the other hand, Mageia has a schedule (which has mainly been kept, though RC and final release have slipped to accommodate a 3rd beta) and some specs.
Yupps, no arguing there, so trying to improve our structure in more similar fashions where appropriate is certainly good examples to follow and not for us to be in denial of nor fend off as evilness itself! :p

> I think you can see why at this stage I am prioritising Mageia work over Mandriva work (although I do try and keep them in sync as much as possible).
Yupp, but as said, I think that point was more than made and made for the very premise of this article itself and rather redundant to point out.. ;)

>> This again of course sounds like pure slander from someone disgruntled from anyone with the bias against Mandriva,
> Hmm, I am still spending some time contributing to Mandriva, and you say the text you are replying to constitutes slander and disgruntlement, and bias against Mandriva? I can't comprehend how you arrive at that conclusion.
Nope, this is a blooper on my part, what I meant was to write "bias against Mageia", more referring to myself and pointing out it's obviousness and not trying to present it as something else for what concerns where my involvement, feelings, motivations or anything else that any attempt of hiding indications of bias of might be portrayed as misleading..

Sorry for my miswriting which could be interpretted in implying anything else at your direction! :(

> For collaboration with Mageia, sharing efforts, inviting them to participate in a bigger foundation with serious commercial backing and such would certainly be welcome and to everyone's interest, but it's simply unrealistic and something few of "us" would be willing to accept if it were lead by people one simply doesn't trust.
There's a reason for us inviting and wishing participation from Mageia, while I stress out the point of starting with more "clean sheets" and avoiding it being lead by people simply not trusted by people in either of the camps.
I think we're pretty much on the same page, but that you're misinterpretating my intentions and motivations, unfortunately and ironically enough, very much so by my efforts of trying to avoid it..
I hope this post should clear things more up and that you read it more than once before (hopefully) replying to it again. :)
> Mageia is an openly governed distribution. The fact that Mandriva/Rosa etc. is not prepared to engage with Mageia at all over personal issues seems more of a problem for Mandriva/Rosa than for Mageia.
Who's said that we're not?
What I've said is that there are clearly *are* personal issues and that they needs to be acknowledged and try solve them or at least do our best in working around them for now, rather than living in denial and everyone talking behind eachothers' backs and what not..

Personally, I hate replying to posts online about non-technical manners, which is why commenting on this article is actually rather difficult to me as there's a lot more attached to it and you have to move in on personal matters which usually would best be adviced taking outside of the public..

But then again, there's a lot of thing being said about people arguing on the internet, which again provides some awkward relief of at least not being alone finding myself in such situations! :o)