Mandriva CEO Jean-Manuel Croset has announced that the company behind the Linux distribution is preparing to hand control of the project over to the community. A unspecified "independent entity" is to take over stewardship "within the next months". According to Croset, a workgroup of community representatives is currently being created to oversee the move to the new governance model.

It is not clear yet what shape the new entity will take and how the community will be involved in the stewardship of the distribution. Croset has also not explained how the commercial company, which has been in financial troubles recently, will monetise the distribution; if, in fact, there are plans to monetise the distribution at all. He did announce that the company would support the distribution, but also did not go into specifics on how that would be happening.

In a discussion on the Mandriva forum, Mandriva contributor Raphaël Jadot pointed out that the company had been told by many community members that the company should try to emulate Red Hat's relationship towards Fedora. Mandriva's decision comes only days after the community had taken matters into its own hands and had started unofficial development on the Mandriva 2012 release.

The community fork Mageia, which was founded in 2010 among concerns over Mandriva's future, has become reasonably popular with users and is currently preparing its second release.

(fab)