Some Mandriva developers and contributors are forking Mandriva; the new distribution is named Mageia. 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.

Some phrases that caught my attention the official announcement:

“We do not trust the plans of Mandriva SA anymore and we don’t think the company (or any company) is a safe host for such a project.”

and

“People working on it just do not want to be dependent on the economic fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company.”

Discussions are going on right now in the IRC channel #mageia on freenode network. There is also a specific channel for KDE on #mageia-kde.

The official announcement and homepage of Mageia project can be viewed here.

Source: Slashdot