Mageia – A New Linux Distribution

Paris, September 18^th 2010

As you may have heard, the future of the Mandriva Linux distribution is unclear.

Most employees working on the distribution were laid off when Edge-IT was liquidated. We do not trust the plans of Mandriva SA anymore and we don't think the company (or any company) is a safe host for such a project.

Many things have happened in the past 12 years. Some were very nice: the Mandriva Linux community is quite large, motivated and experienced, the distribution remains one of the most popular and an award-winning product, easy to use and innovative. Some other events did have some really bad consequences that made people not so confident in the viability of their favourite distribution.

People working on it just do not want to be dependent on the economic fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company.

Forking Mandriva Linux? Yes.

Forking an existing open source project is never an easy decision to make, and forking Mandriva Linux is a huge task.

It was not an impulsive decision. We all spoke a lot before: former employees, Cooker contributors and users' communities. We collected opinions and reactions in the past weeks as we needed to get some kind of global agreement and to gather, before going ahead.

We believe a fork is the best solution and we have decided to create a new distribution: Mageia.

New grounds.

Mageia is a community project: it will not depend on the fate of a particular company.

A not-for-profit organization will be set up in the coming days and it will be managed by a board of community members. After the first year this board will be regularly elected by committed community members.

This organization will manage and coordinate the distribution: code & software hosting and distribution, build system, marketing, foster communication and events. Data, facts, roadmaps, designs will be shared, discussed through this organization.

We will discuss and lay down details in the coming days.

Mageia distribution will be what the board makes it to be, with the help and contribution of the whole community. We already have ideas and plans for this distribution; we want to:

• make Linux and free software straightforward to use for everyone;
• provide integrated system configuration tools;
• keep a high-level of integration between the base system, the desktop (KDE/GNOME) and applications; especially improve third-parties (be it free or proprietary software) integration;
• target new architectures and form-factors;
• improve our understanding of computers and electronics devices users.

You certainly have your ideas too. We will take the time to share these.

Community.

We understand the Mageia community as:

• users,
• makers (designers, developers, packagers, translators, testers, etc.),
• advocates.

Those can be individuals, organizations, companies from all over the world.

There are challenges here; so many countries, so many languages, so many cultures, so different needs. And that's great.

We've seen with the Mandriva Assembly experiment that it's not an easy task. We believe we can make it better yet.

People.

Whatever you do in life, people are your greatest and only true asset. And Mageia aims to help people. Trust matters. We are only at the very beginning of this fork. It won't be easy. But we believe it to be necessary.

For other contributors: if you want your name to be added to the list, indicating that you plan to follow the fork, let us know on IRC channel, or by email.

Next.

We are looking for many different things in the next days:

• hardware for code hosting, build servers + datacenters to host these servers;
• developers, contributors, translators, testers to invest into the development of Mageia;
• counsels on building the organization and its processes, etc.

Your help and support will be very much appreciated.