The Official Mandriva Blog

Mandriva Spring right on time!

We are delivering our Spring Distro on time, i.e., on the very same day we had planned 6 months ago. Thanks to the hard work of the developers in France, Brazil and elsewhere, thanks to the help of all the contributors, without whom none of this could happen, and thanks to Anne’s – how should I put it– gentle, but very firm stewardship. It’s a great distro and we’re proud of it.

Contributions to the Kernel

The Linux foundation recently published information on who contributes to the kernel development. Out of the 30 or so companies which contribute significantly to the kernel, there are only three distribution editors: Red Hat, Novell and Mandriva (and none other). We are happy and proud to do it. And please remember, when you buy Mandriva products or services, you help us contribute to the Linux kernel.

Manbo Labs

We reached the end of our first cycle of Manbo Labs. We set up this joint development effort with our friends from Turbolinux in the Fall of 2007. It was not easy at first since we had different cultures and approaches, but we learned how to work together. The first delivery of Manbo Labs now serves as the core of our Mandriva 2008 Spring distro. Turbolinux will base its next product on the same core. We are happy we did this together, it allowed us to invest more in the core technology. As announced, the core components are all available under a free and open source license

Our recent announcement concerning the creation of a joint lab with Turbolinux has generated some controversy. Even PJ, from Groklaw, a site we like very much at Mandriva, showed some concerns and signaled her intention to stop using our Distro.

So I would like to clarify some points:

1. Signing he Manbo Labs agreement does not change anything to our policy or our commitment to Free and Open Source software and our position with respect to software patent, nor does it change anything to the statement we made about Microsoft partnerships.
2. Our position about software patents is that software should not be patented and we have supported in Europe the fight against software patents.
3. Our support for principles of open source remains what we have always stated

• • everything we develop and distribute is under GPL
  • we develop, maintain and distribute for free a pure GPL distro (Mandriva Free)
  • we develop, maintain and distribute for free a live and light distro (Mandriva One)

1. We are aware and acknowledge the Turbolinux position with respect to Microsoft, and we know that it is very different from ours. The agreement is written so that Mandriva can fully maintain its commitment to Free Open Source.
2. As for Manbo Labs:
   1. The scope of work is about 100 low level RPMs, all in GPL
   2. Product will be available for public release under GPL
   3. Development is public, made on our Cooker environment and associates the community

So we believe that, by setting up Manbo Labs, we are contributing to the development and use of Linux and Free and Open Source software.