Mandriva management wants to collaborate with Mageia - Update

Just days after the planned rebirth of Mandriva as a community distribution, Jean-Manuel Croset (who was recently elevated to the CEO position of Mandriva SA) has outlined the company's future plans in a short blog post. He talks about adapting the company's structure and replacing Mandriva's previous one-size-fits-all strategy with an approach that involves collaborating with the most suitable partner in each business area.

While Croset will continue to focus on an in-house Mandriva distribution for desktops, for server products he hopes to collaborate with the Mandriva fork Mageia, which split from the parent distribution two years ago. Croset does not give many details, but talks about "collaboration and exchanges with the Mageia community" and "contributions to the project". He appears to see Mageia as a more suitable basis for server use than his company's own product, however.

It is not yet clear what sort of reception his proposal is likely to receive from the Mageia team – the developers cited significant differences in their decision to separate from Mandriva's management in 2010, setting up a new, independently run version of the distribution. There have been previous unofficial discussions between Mandriva and Mageia but nothing has yet come of them.

Update - The Mageia board has detailed its response to Mandriva's future plans in a blog post. It has decided that because it has already developed a good governance model for the project and invested time and energy into creating the Mageia project, it would not be a good fit for the community to switch to a currently vaguely defined project which has yet to enumerate its goals.

On the issue of Mandriva basing its server product on Mageia it says that "This decision is the result of discussions that took place between Mandriva and Mageia. A new entity in the Mageia ecosystem is good news". The board also reminded readers that Mageia is free software, allowing anyone to create derivative versions or to contribute to it and that the project is independent of any company.

(fab)