Mandriva to Use Mageia for its Business Servers

Mandriva, a publicly traded Linux and open source software company based in Paris, France, announced it will relinquish the responsibility of the Mandriva Linux distribution to an independent entity.

"After reviewing all your messages, suggestions, ideas and comments, Mandriva SA took the decision to transfer the responsibility of the Mandriva Linux distribution to an independent entity,” wrote Jean-Manuel Croset, CEO at Mandriva, following the announcement through a blog post on the company’s Website.

Croset also announced his plans to collaborate with the Mandriva fork Mageia, which fragmented from the parent distribution two years ago. For now, however, he is not disclosing his entire strategy.

Croset wrote about the "collaboration and exchanges with the Mageia community" and "contributions to the project” and also sees Mageia as a more feasible option for server use than his own company product.

But it wasn’t smooth sailing from the beginning, since the opportunity to have Mageia representatives join the Mandriva working group was initially rejected by the Mageia.Org board, as the Mandriva team did not want to use the governance model of Mageia.

Said Mageia in its blog post:

"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.”

Another reason cited for the decline was its unwillingness to dilute their small resources on new ventures. The company also believes it can continue their world and provide free software without joining a new entity.

“The collaborative efforts of Mandriva and Mageia will no doubt bare fruits and the Linux eco-system may just gain momentum once again,” officials said. “We for one cannot wait to witness how the communities work in tandem.”