DouglasWard.net Random ramblings from an IT Director

Two of my favorite Linux projects are forking!

Mandriva -> Mageia

Mandriva is becoming Mageia.  My first successful foray into the world of open source software (way back in 2002!) was made using Mandriva (called Mandrake way back then) as the operating system.  At that time I was running the current version (Mandrake 9.2).  I started building linux servers using MandrakeLinux 10.0.  There were some rough spots in the road for those of us hosting servers with this product.  Things had a nasty way of changing on us during upgrades that would bring down mission critical systems until I could figure out where the configuration files had moved to without warning.  Once they changed the name to Mandriva and created a subscription based Club membership I knew that my days were numbered.  I hated the thought of having to pay for the club repository so that I could install the software that I wanted.  I switched to Ubuntu about three years ago and never looked back.

After following Mandriva’s various staffing decisions and financial woes it would appear that a large part of the development team has decided to fork the project.  Many of the management decisions that Mandriva (the company) made over the last several years have been disastrous for the end users of Mandriva (the linux distribution).  I for one am glad to see the community taking back control of this project.  I am watching this project very closely, having signed up for the mailing lists and spending a good bit of time in the IRC chatroom.  If this project gets off the ground I will strongly consider switching back!  You can start following the project at http://mageia.org.

OpenOffice -> LibreOffice

I must admit this announcement caught me a bit by surprise:

On the morning of September 28th, a community of developers and other volunteers announced that they were forming The Document Foundation to fulfil the promise of independence written in the original OpenOffice charter. According to the group, “The Foundation will be the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals and organizations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a truly free office suite. It will generate increased competition and choice for the benefit of customers and drive innovation in the office suite market. From now on, the OpenOffice.org community will be known as ‘The Document Foundation.’”

After OpenOffice.org was organized by Sun the project got off to a good start but then stagnated.  Now there is not much development and the product is falling further and further behind.  After Sun was purchased by Oracle, it would appear to be falling behind even faster.  All of that changes with this announcement.  I hope that Oracle steps up and does the right thing by donating the name (OpenOffice.org) to the community (The Document Foundation).  This would put the project in a similar arrangement to the one between The Mozilla Foundation and Firefox.  I will be paying close attention to the developments of this project as well.  You can follow along as well at http://www.documentfoundation.org/.

It’s a great day for freedom!