Developers Fork Mandriva Linux, Creating Mageia 206
Anssi55 writes "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. 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."
Fork of a fork (Score:2, Informative)
Rememer that Mandiva was forked from Red Hat when it was Mandrake, and had bits of Connectiva too.
Re:Don't do it... join forces to Ubuntu. (Score:4, Informative)
Traditionally, a proprietary fork has always been a bad thing. However, there's not so much evidence for that in open source. Most of the time the two forks take ideas from each other, both advancing faster till the stage where one of them stagnates and hands over it's features to the other.
From the user point of view this is great; you don't get data lock in because the source code always lets you see how the formats work; you do get much faster advancing software and it doesn't even really matter which fork you pick (though going with the community rather than the company has always been a good pick; just beware that often the community is with the company).
Just because forks are bad in proprietary software doesn't mean the same here.
Re:Don't do it... join forces to Ubuntu. (Score:4, Informative)
I would recommend helping openSUSE instead. Many technologies are similar and openSUSE is, in my opinion, one of the most nicely rounded distributions - it's just not the popular one.
Yeah, I wonder why.
Maybe because they don't come with repositories configured like ALL OTHER DISTRIBUTIONS out there, for NO REASON. And it's a PAIN to find the addresses, a PAIN to use Yast to pull from them (proxies, non intuitive dialogs, etc, etc)
That, and Suse smoked the data from my HD once.
Re:Name (Score:5, Informative)
Incorrect and backwards.
Excel and PowerPoint had both been successful stand-alone products for several years before "Microsoft Office" was conceived, as a bundle (with Word) of three popular, name-brand products at a lower total price. At the time, Excel had just overtaken 1-2-3 as the best-selling spreadsheet program, and this was an effort at coattails-style marketing synergy, as avid Word users would become Excel and PowerPoint users, Excel fans would switch to Word and Powerpoint, etc. What Microsoft would lose in revenue they'd gain in market share, a tactic that contributed to the decline of WordPerfect, Borland, and Lotus, and Microsoft's near-monopoly on commercial office suites.
This was around the same time that Microsoft started making "Microsoft" part of the official names of the applications, amalgamating its line of popular individual software products into a monolithic brand: not just "Microsoft's spreadsheet program, Excel" but "the spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel". This went further as "Microsoft Excel" became "Microsoft Office Excel". (And if not for the anti-vertical-integration court cases, I suspect it would be bundled as "Microsoft Office Windows Excel" by now.)
Re:Name (Score:1, Informative)
I used to sell computers for a few years, and believe me, people have no idea what Office is. Some people call it their Microsoft, some people don't even realize it's not just something essential to computerhood.
Re:Don't do it... join forces to Ubuntu. (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe so, but these problems have been fixed in the 11.x releases. zypper works beautifully now, and fast too. And installing the codecs couldn't be easier: http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_formats/11.3 [opensuse-community.org]