Distributions

Mandriva Linux forked into Mageia

After years of financial problems and layoffs, the Mandriva community has finally taken matters into its own hands and forked the distribution. More accurately, some ex-Mandriva employees and interested parties from the community have announced an intention to fork and are working to gather interest and set up shop.

Mandriva, formerly MandrakeSoft, has had a long history with financial troubles. The most recent release was delayed by a few months due to financial troubles, and the company was in in discussions to be sold earlier this year. As it turns out, Mandriva eventually sold a controlling stake to a company called NGI, based in Russia for a €2 million investment.

Following the investment, Mandriva conducted another large layoff and has started, yet again, to restructure. This time the company has been pared down to 27 developers and four subcontractors. According to the post on the company blog laying out the reasons for restructuring, the company plans to make a number of new hires to compensate for the layoffs — but not the original employees. The company also plans to hire a community manager, though it's not clear that a community manager would have much of a remaining community to interact with.

For the former employees and other concerned community members, the latest round of layoffs was enough. On September 18th, the Mageia project was launched with a lengthy list of original employees from Mandriva and Mandriva contributors. Why? According to the announcement:

The mission statement so far is a bit vague. The project lists "ideas and plans" for the new distribution, including making Linux and free software "straightforward" to use for everyone; providing integrated system configuration tools; providing a high level of integration for the distribution; and targeting new form-factors and architectures. In short, it sounds mostly like the project wishes to continue Mandriva under a new banner and as a project rather than commercial interest.

At the moment, there's not much to see at the new Mageia site. It has links to mailing lists, which are largely clogged with statements of support and offers of contributions and a couple of posts asking "where are the jobs?" There's also a new blog, with postings thanking the community for its enthusiasm and outlining the next steps.

Romain d'Alverny, former Web department manager at Mandriva, noted that it will be a while before the project reaches the point of offering employment. In fact, the project is still getting to the point of offering a wiki, blog, and basic services aside from the mailing lists. The initial project announcement says that the project is seeking code hosting, build servers, contributors, and counsel on building the organization.

openSUSE community manager Jos Poortvliet has extended an offer of assistance to the nascent Mageia community, and suggests that some Mageia contributors might want to attend the upcoming openSUSE Conference to collaborate. Poortvliet has also recommended that the Mageia team consider making use of the openSUSE Build Service to start:

The offer of community assistance and tools might be well-received by Mageia's growing community, or they might see it as an attempt to capitalize on an unfortunate situation. There's also the small matter of openSUSE's sponsor Novell possibly selling off SUSE Linux (perhaps to VMware) in the near term.

If Mageia is to make a go of it, the community would do well to avoid the approach often taken by Mandriva itself — attempting to do many things, rather than focusing on specific user profiles. The latest post on the Mandriva blog is a good example. The company is struggling to keep its head above water, yet it promises to deliver desktop, server, and education-focused distributions. It also plans to have a "cloud strategy" and online services integrated into the desktop versions, as well as tablet releases for ARM and Intel-based platforms. Given the company's resources, it might be better to plan to focus on one or two areas of development and see if it can become revenue-positive before developing cloud strategies or attempting to launch a tablet-based distribution.

Can Mageia be successful? The users and contributors who have stayed with Mandriva over the years have shown remarkable loyalty to the distribution. If that translates into contributions and the community is focused, it's possible that Mageia could be a successful venture. It seems all but certain at this point that Mandriva as a company and a distribution are on borrowed time. With any luck, the community die-hards that have stuck around this long will be able to thrive as a community project where commercial ventures have failed.

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Distribution newsletters

• Debian Project News (September 21)
• DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 372 (September 20)
• Fedora Weekly News Issue 243 (September 15)
• openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 141 (September 18)
• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 211 (September 18)

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