The new "community" Mandriva

Mandriva SA, the company behind the Mandriva distribution, has announced it will return control of the distribution back "to the community." But exactly how that will play out in practice remains unclear, since the company was unable to convince the Mageia distribution to participate in the new effort — but, conversely, is cooperating with Mageia for future products.

Communities and entities

Mandriva made the community hand-over announcement on May 17, saying that it had decided to "transfer the responsibility of the Mandriva Linux distribution to an independent entity." The announcement outlines only a rough plan, with the formation of a governing body that will include representatives from Mandriva SA, but will not be under the company's direct control. The company will also continue to contribute its engineering resources to Mandriva development. The announcement then states that the details of the organization's governance model, processes, and other infrastructure will be fleshed out over the next few months, a process to be handled by a still-in-formation workgroup of community members.

There have been several forks of the Mandriva distribution, but by far the largest is Mageia. Yet the Mageia board announced on May 21 that it had decided not to join the new Mandriva workgroup — at least, not as a group. The announcement enumerates five reasons for the decision.

First, the Mageia board feels that the Mageia.org organization already meets the needs that Mandriva SA gave for forming a new entity, and felt that the company should have joined it instead. Second, Mageia has "invested a lot of time and energy" to define Mageia as it is. Third, there is a lack of information about the future direction of the proposed Mandrake community entity. Fourth, the Mageia project does not have enough resources to take on a new project in addition to its existing work. Finally, because Mageia is already free software, code sharing between the projects can already happen without establishing any formal arrangement.

Some of the listed reasons are perplexing. Clearly the first two indicate that the project thought Mandriva SA should simply adopt Mageia as its community distribution as-is. That would offer technical challenges, since the two projects have diverged in key areas since the original split (package managers, for example), as well as trademark issues. The last two are easily justifiable — patches do already flow back and forth between the distributions, and one rarely hears of a distribution project with too much time and developer resources on its hands.

But the middle reason is a puzzle. It sounds as if the Mageia board rejected an offer to take a seat (or seats) on the Mandriva community governance entity, when the stated offer was a place in the workgroup that will define the entity's standards and practices. If the Mageia board was concerned about the future direction of the new project or entity, surely participating in the workgroup would be the best way to influence that direction for the better. Comments on the Mandrake SA announcement indicate that at least one other Mandriva fork, ROSA, is joining the workgroup.

Products, products, products

The other wrinkle in the Mandriva makeover story is Mandriva SA's May 20 product announcement. In the post, the company outlines new product plans and how they relate to the evolving situation with the base distribution. The desktop product will be based on the new community-managed version of Mandrake, as will its OEM and education offerings. Pulse2, the company's corporate system deployment and management product, will continue to be developed and contributions will be made back to the Mandriva community. The company's server offering, however, will be based on Mageia.

Mageia confirmed the arrangement in the blog post linked to above, saying that it arose out of talks with Mandriva SA. It is not clear whether the decision involves any sort of development effort on Mageia's (or individual Mageia developers') part, but the project did take pains to emphasize that it had no bearing on the future development of Mageia itself. Several commenters on the Mandriva announcement asked why the company would choose to build its server product on a different code base than its desktop product, particularly in light of the divergence between Mandriva and Mageia and Mageia's 18-month life cycle (which is brief for a server distribution).

So far, there has not been an elaboration on the business server arrangement from either party. But that could simply be lack of time; Mageia released the final version of Mageia 2 on May 22. We previewed the release in April. Mandriva, meanwhile, has started to flesh out the beginnings of its community development plan on its wiki, and ROSA has rolled out its latest release. Hopefully, with the new release out the door at Mageia, and the Mandriva workgroup taking shape, we will soon hear more details.