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OpenMandriva Project state and comments to recent questions

Posted: 26 July 2015, 10:42
by rugyada
Hello community

The recent message "Project state, future and the inevitable doom” was considered so counterproductive and rude that we've had to mute it and put its author on premoderation for now because we want this list to be productive without degenerating into flamewar-of-the-day.

OpenMandriva is a team, consisting of many people, investing lots of time into the distro. We all have opinions and don't always agree, but we always look for consensus and resolve conflicts peacefully. Anyone can ask for an issue to be put on a meeting agenda (meetings are held regularly at known times).The author of the muted email never did this. (To give you another idea of the approach, recently he stated for example, that the meetings were no good because they were held at the same time every week. So no matter what we do we will always be wrong).

The email violates our code of conduct (https://wiki.openmandriva.org/en/Mod) in several ways, and recent ECHR case law actually requires us to remove content that is potentially offensive to third parties (such as Matthew) from our servers. (see e.g. http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/20 ... -comments/ )


The email does bring up a few points that we think need to be clarified (this tricky desinformation flow could seed some doubts, unfortunately).

1. It is true that we are not rich, but we have enough money to keep all of our infrastructure safe for a minimum of 1 year from now, and we constantly work on various possibilities to further improve our financial state. And we do have progress. Members of association get annual financial report, and answers to questions immediately after they ask these. We got nothing to hide and give no grounds to conspiracy theories.

2. Speaking of infra, in the last few days there was a high risk of that ABF would be switched off very soon (and ROSA would move its data somewhere else, relaunch etc, they can tell better themselves if asked). However, the Council was busy saving all our data and making sure that all of our common work is not under threat anymore. While the email author was busy with text in his regular style.

3. As for the trademark situation, unfortunately "Mandriva is dead, so all their trademarks are gone" is not true, trademarks can be sold off and Mandriva did that before being dissolved. The deal that allows us to use the OpenMandriva name is perpetual however, and cannot be revoked by the new owner of the trademarks, so we are safe. Similarily, Hearst still claims to own the Mandrake name, and while their case is weak, we don't think fighting off trademark suits is a wise use of our resources.

4. It was common decision to have not a “project leader”, but several people covering this role's objectives. Anyone interested in more details, give a shout, we will tell more or dig out the relevant meeting logs.

As always, we welcome any input as long as it is made in a civilized manner - and let's avoid beating a dead horse over and over again.

OpenMandriva Council

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The above email has been sent by Council to OpenMandriva mailing lists

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