We have two very interesting news items to share today, just a few days before our Mageia 2 final release.

Mandriva Linux community project

Mandriva recently announced that it will transfer the responsibility of the Mandriva Linux distribution to an independent entity. We would very much like to express our very best wishes for this new entity.

Mageia.Org’s board was contacted privately by Mr. Croset before this announcement, to discuss the opportunity to have Mageia representatives joining their working group (unfortunately the discussion had to be private, as it was requested by Mandriva to keep the information private until their announcement). Ultimately, the Mageia.Org board declined the offer and for clarity we are publishing the reasons for this decision here:

the Mageia.org governance model is good and has been defined for very specific reasons: independence of the Mageia project from commercial constraints, democratic elections, meritocratic inclusion, no appointed or reserved positions.It would have been, in our view, an excellent open platform for Mandriva to join. We do not yet know the reasons why Mandriva ultimately felt this was not a good fit for them at this time.

We have invested a lot of time and energy over many conversations and discussions to define Mageia on several levels. And we continue to release updates and the betas and RCs for Mageia 2, and we regularly put our contributions back into the Linux ecosystem.

We do not have much information about the directions in which this future entity might go, nor about the goals of each of the potential participants.

We do not wish to dilute our (small) resources further on a new thing to define and build; we think our priorities are elsewhere right now.

All our work is free software, so we can already share code and collaborate with other distributions when needed, without joining a new entity.

Mandriva: welcome back to the party!

Mageia is gaining a derivative product

In other news, Mandriva announced that they will use the Mageia distribution as a technical platform for their new Business Server product.

This decision is the result of discussions that took place between Mandriva and Mageia. A new entity in the Mageia ecosystem is good news.

To make everything clear and avoid any misunderstanding, we would like to remind you of a few points:

Mageia is free software, so it is of course possible for anybody to create Mageia derivatives;

Mageia welcomes contributions from all individuals and companies as long as they follow the rules of the project;

Mageia has a well defined governance model and organization, and there is no plan to change it;

Mageia is independent of any company.

And that’s not all!

Mageia 2 is coming next!