Developers Fork Mandriva Linux, Creating Mageia

[Christopher Browne]

On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 2:57 PM, Michael Lauzon <mlauzon-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> From Slashdot:
>
> "As most of the Mandriva employees working on the Linux distribution
> were laid off due to the liquidation of Edge-IT (a subsidiary of
> Mandriva SA) and trust in the company has diminished, the development
> community -- including the core developers -- has decided to fork the
> project (http://www.mageia.org/). The new Linux distribution, named
> Mageia , will be managed by a not-for-profit organization that will be
> set up in the coming days. There are already many people that have
> decided to follow the fork, but the people behind it are still
> welcoming any help offered in the various tasks related to
> establishing the new distribution."

I suspect that this has taken place ~5 years too late...

The project had the supporting organization fall out from under it
once already; for it to happen again does not look very good.

This is the *serious* downside of tying systems to the vagaries of
supporting corporations, which have a strange tendency to:
 a) Get bought by someone else (MySQL, Sun, Oracle, ...)
 b) Go out of business (Mandrake has done this twice now.  Oh, no,
they now call it
     Mandriva...)
 c) Decide that the project isn't in their shareholders' interests
anymore.  (RIP OpenSolaris)

Mandriva mayn't be dead, but things are certainly smelling a bit funny...
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