Friday, June 03, 2011

Mageia first out the door in June!

The distribution forked after last September's large layoff of Mandriva developers has now reached its first release. Mageia was formed probably less than two months after that shift in Mandriva strategy. I am pretty sure that by November the group had already met, named itself, and put up some public information.

It was from there until about February that Mageia had some of its most difficult struggles - getting the correct infrastructure into place, and attempting to cast a schedule. They were behind a few times until they got the first build actually up and working. From then on, they cast a new project schedule and they kept it very well until release.

I feel that this release feels a lot like Mandriva, because in a lot of ways it IS a lot like Mandriva. The core tools come directly from Mandriva and they are written and maintained by former Mandriva developers. No reasons NOT to use them, since 1. They were maintained by some of these very engineers and 2. If it is licensed under the GPL (GNU General Public License), it had better be freely available, and it is.

I am not sure if Mandriva can recover from twelve years of financial distress, numerous ups and downs in the financial stability and reputation of the company. Mageia, on the other hand, while not ground shattering, implements the functionality previously released in Mandriva, and it is about as stable as I can ever remember it being, so this is a good release; it's just not anything unique, new, or innovative - YET. Give them time; without management interference, they are already doing better than they were under corporate control. Expect some good things and expect them to stay free. You heard it here, and I read it on their site.

1 comment:

Tim said...

Interesting, I hadn't even heard Mandriva had forked much less that a new forked release was already out! :)

Yet another release that Jim has in his backlog I bet! :D