The new "community" Mandriva

Posted Jun 1, 2012 10:28 UTC (Fri) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

It's not over (at least there's Mageia and I think it's worth supporting) but IMNSHO the project/product/company has fell prey to IBM/RH play in the Russian government market at least to some extent (an icing on the top of Duval's ejection and subsequent events). Watch the fingers:

• back in 2007 or so, Denis Sosnovtsev from IBM Russia told me in person that despite all the effort in governmental sector spearheaded by ALT Linux, he doesn't see them as the fit company since IBM is fine with Red Hat and he personally is a convinced globalist;
• in 2008, ALT Linux and partners performed a pilot project delivering free software to the schools throughout three test regions of Russian Federation that was a complete success (surprisingly to many including me);
• in 2009, PingWinSoft company was incorporated and took over the whole country deployment project just to fail it miserably (and in the same time trying to kill off ALT Linux by making private proposals to the team members to support its fork which it has abandoned later);
• Rosalab was created by the same PigWinSoft people (including investors and management) and tried to take over ALT Linux/Sirius developments for National Software Platform (a bit more complicated since they have also effectively ruined RASPO, a FLOSS support association, along that way);
• at the very last days of December 2011, all the RASPO-proposed distributions for NSP were rather rejected *except* for the Red Hat clone made by VNIINS (which has in turn been essentially taken over by Red Hat regarding technology several years ago via IBM RU/VDEL) which was approved with numerous questionable bits in the process;
• the latest news is that ministry of communications decided to rather fail the whole NSP project altogether.

So my take is that Mandriva was taken as a change coin to kill off ALT Linux as a local software vendor incompatible with politics carried out by Big Blue: "just pay up, consume what we give you and don't touch anything" (a quote from Sosnovtsev again).

It's not entirely surprising that it's hard for any honest man to deal with folks plunging into activities like killing off someone else just to be killed off either.

And we at ALT Linux Team are still working on providing reasonably independent IT research and development in operating environments for Russia. My best wishes to colleagues at Mageia project and my hope's that goodwill is what finally prevails.