01.18.08

Groklaw, Mandriva and Turbolinux

Posted in English, Mandriva at 11:43 am by François Bancilhon

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.

6 Comments

  1. Geek Lectures - Things geeks should know about » Blog Archive » Groklaw, Mandriva and Turbolinux said,

    January 18, 2008 at 12:40 pm

    […] DesktopLinux.com — All About Linux on the Desktop wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt 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: 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 s […]

  2. rm said,

    January 18, 2008 at 3:00 pm

    Thanks for the explanation. Personally, I think that as long as there are not IP related royalties being paid by Mandriva to TurboLinux it should be OK. I don’t know if that is the case though.

  3. R Allen said,

    January 19, 2008 at 1:15 am

    Thanks once again to François Bancilhon for reassuring us about Mandriva’s purity of heart - no sarcasm intended - I will take him at his word.

    But what a pity that the pure waters of libre software have now been poisoned by the disingenuous M$ agreements, and as a result, statements like this even need to be made, and having been made should be questioned.

    It STILL is really all about the freedom…

    Thanks again François,

    R Allen

  4. Boycott Novell » Don’t Let Journalists Make You Afraid of Mandriva, JVC said,

    January 20, 2008 at 7:16 am

    […] is what Mandriva’s CEO had to say in response to those who are worried. Our recent announcement concerning the creation of a joint lab with Turbolinux has generated some […]

  5. AshLeDombos said,

    January 20, 2008 at 3:10 pm

    Strange that sometimes working in free software is like walking on eggs. You try to do something that seems to be correct, respecting free software philosophy, but people says you are evil more than MS because you work with someone who paid MS :(

    By the way, stop using KDE 4, there is kicker by default in it, which was developped by Suse/Novell, who also signed with MS. So KDE 4 is evil, never use it !

  6. rm said,

    January 21, 2008 at 4:09 pm

    I found this reassuring post by Adam Willson:

    “Let’s just clarify some things explicitly, hopefully this will help:

    This deal does not involve Microsoft in any way. No one from Microsoft has any involvement in this deal at all. I have no idea if they even know about it.

    This deal does not involve anything at all that TurboLinux has licensed from Microsoft or has any kind of agreement with Microsoft about.

    This deal does not involve any code at all which is not under a F/OSS license.

    This deal does not in any way at all affect any position of Mandriva’s with regards to industry standards, F/OSS ideals, or interoperability, intellectual property, the desirability of dealing with Microsoft. It doesn’t affect any of Mandriva’s philosophical positions on anything at all, in fact.

    I hope that’s clear enough. :)”

    http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?p=426345&sid=6266a1ea8c37ac83bbba771a42169c44#426345

    To me the important part was this:
    “This deal does not involve anything at all that TurboLinux has licensed from Microsoft or has any kind of agreement with Microsoft about.”

    I am sure glad to read this!

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