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potential sad news on the horizon?


paul
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This from the MUGS mailing list

This is a message from LuismaGo, from Blogdrake.net:

 

"I think we are going through the hardest part in the life of Mandriva, even harder than when Mandrake broke and the Club had to be brought up. At least, there was no desktop distribution that could meet Mandrake during that crisis, and the Community (yes, with upper "C") responded in the right way: supporting Mandrake economically when the Club was created as a financing method.

 

Now there is no possibility of economic recovery, if we consider the rumors coming from the company itself. Mandriva company has made several moves all over the place: the purchase of Conectiva, using a weird name to the distro, buying Lycoris, changing the names of the releases, switching to an annual release, firing Gaël Duval, switching back to two releases by year, believing that Spring happens at the same time in France and in the rest of the world, dissolution of the Club, giving diversity of versions of the same distribution that confuse users (One, Free, Powerpack), major restructuring changes like the one that made Adam Williamson leave, many CEO changes, payments suspensions, company bankruptcy and main developers fleeing the company.

 

The current situation is that the distro is abandoned by the company until the next board meeting decides what should be done about it. But even if the decision is made to move forward with the distro there is one problem: the developers have left.

 

I think that none of those that belong to the communities have now the same knowledge of how developments that were done by them work, and although this can be fixed (the source code is there to be studied) it takes time, and it may take a long time. We need them if we want to create the Community fork of Mandriva, so here are the two possibilities that can co-exist:

 

1.- Mandriva-company creates a foundation, just like Fedora, and gives the Community certain tools to enable the development of a base that they can later polish and then use it for their servers distributions.

 

2.- The community continues on its own and creates a distribution, following the CentOS model, identical (or almost) with the Mandriva-company one but with another name. This would be the fork, strictly speaking.

 

Although the first option seems easier due to the support in infrastructure received by the company, we have to bear in mind that without the current developers, who obviously won't cooperate with the company that kicked them off, the base distribution will be very poor and can take a long time to go back to the level of the current distro, and the level could even get worse instead of improving.

 

The second option is more feasible but only if the current developers have a job that allows them to cooperate as part of the community and open the path so that the community gets involved as fast as possible.

 

Anyway, both options need the Community to get involved in the development. The first thing to do is to change the concept of Community. It should not be a simple "alliance" between MUGs or separated groups. The Community should be all of us, the users of the current Mandriva-distro, some more active than others, but not separated in independent groups. We all know that not everybody can, want or know how to cooperate, but that level of involvement is not necessary. All that's necessary is a critical mass that will be involved in development, translation, tests and bugs hunting or just propaganda.

 

We have to forget about MIB, MUD or BDK-packagers. Now we can't go on our own. Now all the participants of these projects have to stop being a complement to the packages that Mandriva provides, but they will have to provide the packages that Mandriva provided, and not separately but as a single one homogeneous Community. Therefore a key aspect is to count on the help of the current developers who left. Their leadership and their knowledge is what that can unify all this. And, of course, there is still a lot to discuss about how to finance all this.

 

I finish with a third option: the current developers of Mandriva end up working for another distro and they integrate the MCC and all the Drakes in it. I think that the solution here is pretty clear for all of us."

 

We are interested in the views of all of you to act accordingly.

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Hmm.. as expected - things are getting worse. :end: The good thing is that not only me has realized that it is necessary to either create a fork or to copy the fedora/Red Hat model (as I proposed already before and already years before). I would love to help tp keep the distro alive (btw. I just reinstalled Mdv 2010.1, dissatisfied with Debian, Ubuntu and openSuse) but the bad thing is in my case: I am no coder. :puter: :unsure: The only way for me to contribute would be in a) the artistic area, B) documentation or c) reporting bugs. But taking into account the limited sparetime I have, my contributions would be ... errm... :blush:

 

Anyway, I think it's a good sign that community starts to act and gather everyone who can help in keeping the distro alive. Sometimes a disaster is necessary in order to improve things.

 

Did they mention already where they would gather the volunteers for discussing the next steps?

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The text of LuismaGo has been posted on many platforms, it was also mentioned in a mail from Olivier Mejean to many people who are known as admins or leaders of user communities. Here's my reply:

----

 

Of course such kind of discussions have been going on for weeks now in most forums I've seen (and the other addressees will surely agree).

 

These discussions were unavoidable given the situation and the reactions of the Mandriva management to the situation wrt the user community. At MandrivaUser.de we had a similar discussions being triggered by an article I wrote in our community magazine.

 

As for the blogdrake posting you are referring to, I do not agree to some of the opinions in the first part of the posting (about all the "wrong" things) but the general assessment is clear and from the discussions in MandrivaUser.de I get the impression that there is an agreement on the following points at MandrivaUser.de:

 

1. As it seems there is not much interest in the Mandriva leading powers to continue the Mandriva Linux distribution in the way we knew it. Even if there was: the people who actually designed and formed and "made" the distribution during the previous years are all gone by now. So, a continued "Mandriva Linux" under the reign of the Mandriva management seems to be a no-go at this point.

 

2. A user community based fork seems to be a first class choice at first sight. But then, at closer look, we should recognize that these "combined forces of the user communities" are not really there. Each user community has their packagers who are working in their way, which has been in compliance with the Mandriva Linux rules, but sometimes not. Opinions about that are very different and there have been some discussions in the past as well. So I think there will be no

real collaboration (in the meaning of the blogdrake posting) unless there is a organisational leading group who decides on such discussions and individual opinions. Who would that be, who would be accepted as such leaders and will their decisions be accepted by all others? We have seen some unpleasant proof of the very difficult nature of this issue.

 

This issue is important, it is not trivial by all means, but the solution is not impossible. A solution, in other words: organising a "User Community Union" where the organisations are equal partners is essential.

 

3. The second problem of a user community based fork is the expertise.

Packagers are not developpers (in most cases), they have no real experience nor expertise how to build a distribution. Most people in my organisation are quite aware that maintaining the distribution means to have at least a large part of the cooker community aboard. They could bring in the expertise which the user community has not. And they could bring in the knowledge and developing skills to continue the distribution including security updates and innovations which are also essential for a living distribution.

 

4. The third problem of a user community based fork is the technical infrastructure.

The distribution can not be continued without the necessary infrastructure (svn, mailing lists, rules, documentation, committing rules, buildnodes, etc.). Adding to this the experience of organising the development and roll-out of a distribution. All this is not available in the user community. But it is available in the cooker community.

 

So, as a conclusion:

 

A fork is the way to go, no doubt about that. But it has to be done by a common project, standing on 2 strong legs:

- the cooker community for developing improvements, maintaining the distribution, and roll out the release,

- the user community for support, spreading, media relations, documentation, etc. - in short: everything non-technical.

All this has to be organized and led by a "steering group" which has the necessary experience in that field and is accepted by all.

 

In general I would see a good chance for a project of such kind, adding a strong commercial partner (in the style of Novell/openSUSE or Red Hat / Fedora) would be a perfect solution and a solution which would be able to stay, even through unavoidable discussions about different opinions.

 

All the above is a mix of the German discussions at MandrivaUser.de as well as private discussions with leading members of the German organisation.

 

Thx for your time.

 

wobo

MandrivaUser.de

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wobo, I don't understand why you create a non-existent division between the cooker community and the user community.

 

The cooker community is simply a subset of the user community (+ Mandriva employees), not a separate community and that would still be the case after a fork.

 

I can only see a fork work if it's lead by users who are currently active on cooker, rather than users that have had no active involvement with cooker up to now (of course the latter would have to be encouraged to join the new forked cooker to replace the voids left by leaving Mandriva employees).

 

The main point is the infrastructure and the organizational structure. Also as said already, it would help a lot if as many former Mandriva employees would continue to work on a forked cooker as volunteers.

 

I would actually consider this forum (mandrivausers.org) to be the best neutral place, to be used as a forum of the new forked Mandriva user community, since it's not specific to any local MUG. I guess Paul wouldn't mind.

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I don't understand why people wanna fork Mandriva instead of just joining an already existing distro. In other words Mandriva has already been forked:

though PCLinuxOS doesn't use Mandriva for its base anymore AFAIK.

But both of them already have an existing infrastructure a working website and distro, or many distros.

Yet everybody seems to ignore this and wants to start everything from the beginning. In IT there's already a name for this attitude: NIH (short for Not Invented Here). It got it's name from big companies which always wrote their own software, instead of buying from others or use open source, hence got a huge disadvantage on the market. Today even huge companies seem to avoid this. Yet you think a hobby distro will do it what even multi-billion companies can't. Google on it to know how "successful" this strategy is.

We don't even have a developer crew. Who's gonna maintain the version tracker, the bug tracking system,the wiki and the website? And who's gonna develop the distro? And write the docs? We don't even have a cooperating international community. These are all critical for a Linux distro and all we should do is use the already existing, well tested infrastructure.

Reinventing the wheel is the last thing we should think about.

Maybe there are good reasons to start an independent distro but so far I haven't heard any.

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wobo, I don't understand why you create a non-existent division between the cooker community and the user community.

This dividion was not made by me originally, I had to learn this the hard way in the cooker mailinglist and in discussions with various developers and other members of the cooker <whatever>. The division is there, no use to deny it. Read the relevant mails in the cooker mailinglist - they do emphasize the difference.

 

But in my posting this is only semantics, if you prefer you can easily exchange "cooker community" with "cooker part of the community" and "user community" likewise (which is my preferred POV anyway).

 

Joining forces with PCLOS or Unity are ideas which I'd rather discuss if we realize that a fork / branch of Mandriva Linux is not working. Why try other things before you not even tried to keep alive what we have and what we regard as good?

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But both of them already have an existing infrastructure a working website and distro, or many distros.

Yet everybody seems to ignore this and wants to start everything from the beginning. ...

Maybe there are good reasons to start an independent distro but so far I haven't heard any.

Well, PCLinuxOS and UnityLinux have a different philosophy of what a distribution should be, act and look like. And the number of coders available there is still pretty small. IMHO it is a bit doubtful, that some independend coders that are interested in keeping Mandriva alive are interested to invest their time and energy for doing it the PCLinuxOS or UnityLinux way. I hope you get my point. Just like many debian coders don't want to code for ubuntu (e.g. because of personal distaste), the same can be true regarding Mandriva and the existing forks. You know... there are always some purists out there. ;)

 

If everything shall be merged in one project, UnityLinux would get my vote, as it is a pretty flexible base to start from. PCLinuxOS is already way too "independend" IMHO.

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Joining forces with PCLOS or Unity are ideas which I'd rather discuss if we realize that a fork / branch of Mandriva Linux is not working. Why try other things before you not even tried to keep alive what we have and what we regard as good?

Why do we need to make an enormous effort just to see what was obvious from the first moment: together we can do more in a shorter time.

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Well, PCLinuxOS and UnityLinux have a different philosophy of what a distribution should be, act and look like.

You mean desktop orientation? First of all I don't think that choosing the purpose of the distro you make is a disadvantage. Mandriva should have done that a long time ago IMHO. I think they've done that because they don't have the manpower to maintain all the software on Earth which what was Mandriva trying to do.

Besides if the "new" Mandriva will release code that will be server\enterprise oriented code so the aim could change very easily if there will be people who actually do the work.

And the number of coders available there is still pretty small.

Maybe, I don't know. But a small team is already more than what we have currently.

IMHO it is a bit doubtful, that some independend coders that are interested in keeping Mandriva alive are interested to invest their time and energy for doing it the PCLinuxOS or UnityLinux way. I hope you get my point. Just like many debian coders don't want to code for ubuntu (e.g. because of personal distaste), the same can be true regarding Mandriva and the existing forks. You know... there are always some purists out there. ;)

I get your point but we don't have a Debian - Ubuntu rivalry here. Neither PcLinuxOS nor Unity want to take over the Linux world. They are both non-profit, community oriented distros especially Unity. There can be reasons for not helping them of course but only technological IMHO (or if you hate one of the devs).

There are "purists" of course but I believe they are the minority.

 

So before rejecting the idea right away we should think about it and probably ask the Unity\PCLinuxOS devs that what they are thinking about it. There can be too many benefits to this just to throw it away completely without any discussion.

If everything shall be merged in one project, UnityLinux would get my vote, as it is a pretty flexible base to start from. PCLinuxOS is already way too "independend" IMHO.

PCLinuxOS already has a "benevolent dictator" in place. It's his project and he will remain in control unless he chooses otherwise. We all know that so my vote also goes to Unity Linux.
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You mean desktop orientation?

No, I mean things like using smart or urpmi, kde or gnome, lightweight or with all whistles and bells, modular-base-cd or all-in-one-package-dvd.
First of all I don't think that choosing the purpose of the distro you make is a disadvantage. Mandriva should have done that a long time ago IMHO. I think they've done that because they don't have the manpower to maintain all the software on Earth which what was Mandriva trying to do.
I don't know, if they really maintained and built all the packages, using their developers precious time. If they did so, then ... well, no wonder they went upside down. Packaging can and should be done, using a special build-server. Only if packages break during testing, they should be fixed by the devs.
But a small team is already more than what we have currently.
Agreed.
There are "purists" of course but I believe they are the minority.
Well, let's hope so.
So before rejecting the idea right away we should think about it and probably ask the Unity\PCLinuxOS devs that what they are thinking about it.
Who do you mean with "we"? The Ex-Mandriva-employees? The cooker-community? There is no vocal leader yet who can do the talking for the whole Mandriva-Community with the UnityLinux-Crew. ;)
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Why do we need to make an enormous effort just to see what was obvious from the first moment: together we can do more in a shorter time.

Ah, you must be much better informed than me about everything related that you see something "obvious from the first moment". I don't.

And I repeat arctic's question: Who do you mean with "we"?

Edited by wobo
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Well after years of hanging out on the official Mandriva forum, here I am over at the mandrivausers forum. I guess I am finally seeing the handwriting on the wall. For me the one thing that really differentiates Mandriva from all the rest (except PCLinuxOS of course) is draktools. For me draktools is huge. If I had to leave Mandriva it would probably be for SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop simply because at least it has YAST + enhanced support, although that distribution's future is not to clear now either. I have been a Mandriva Power Pack user since Linux Mandrake 6.0 circa 1999. As such I am extremely spoiled and choosy about what sort of OS I run on my systems. I have been hoping that somehow things at Mandriva would finally get sorted out, but that looks less likely to happen than ever at this point. It is just totally amazing that a company that seems to have been cursed with a death wish from the beginning has managed to package such an incredible distro. And that is certainly a tribute to the amazing Community that is so full of life that even the suicidal spirit of the walking corpse has been unable to quench it. Sadly, Mandriva the company seems bent on becoming even more poisonous. The recent chatter I am seeing suggests that they are planning on focusing their desktop efforts on Brazil. What kind of plan is that? Everything this company does seems to be a bit crazy and direction-less. Hopefully, we, the Mandriva community, can join forces with (an)other distro(s) and continue the legend that is Mandriva the distro. From day to day Mandriva the company simply seems more and more disconnected and irrelevant.

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Welcome aboard. .)

The recent chatter I am seeing suggests that they are planning on focusing their desktop efforts on Brazil. What kind of plan is that?

A pretty simple plan: The wages paid in Brazil are below those paid in France, thus the company believes that part of their financial problems can be solved by using "cheaper brazilian manpower" instead of "expensive european manpower". I wonder however how much the migration-costs will be, setting up new servers, offices, etc. :rolleyes: Marketing is still an unknown word for that company.

 

Anyway, it's just another example of Mandriva not having any clue of business-strategies that can lead to success.

 

And yes, the Draktools are better than anything else for administrative tasks IMHO.

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I wonder however how much the migration-costs will be, setting up new servers, offices, etc.

 

What migration costs? Mandriva already has an office with developers that work on the distro in Brasil (the former Conectiva staff and office), all it needs to do is increase staff in Brasil to compensate for the reduction of staff in Paris.

 

The distro is not being developed for Brasil but rather from Brasil. I'd imagine the main focus will be for Russia, for that project of Linux in all Russian schools that the new investor is involved in.

 

I don't see any problem for Mandriva the company (in fact if anything it's on a more stable financial footing now than 6 months ago), the potential concern for us users is how will the distro change (providing it will change)?

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Who do you mean with "we"? The Ex-Mandriva-employees? The cooker-community? There is no vocal leader yet who can do the talking for the whole Mandriva-Community with the UnityLinux-Crew. ;)

We = Mandriva users.

 

Ah, you must be much better informed than me about everything related that you see something "obvious from the first moment". I don't.

And I repeat arctic's question: Who do you mean with "we"?

Better informed? It's pretty obvious at least for me that 2 communities can achieve more than one. I don't need any info for that.

1st we = Mandriva users.

2nd we = Mandriva users + Unity(PCLinuxOS) users

 

 

Anyway the debate seems pointless now because from their announcement it seems that there will be Mandriva Linux, or at least one more release.

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