Mageia Blog (English)

It’s a very sad day today.  We lost a very nice friend yesterday, a former colleague, an amazing contributor and an ardent advocate of free software.

We will always remember him as a very close friend, skilled developer and also for his humor, enthusiasm and posting kind  messages to the distribution users.

He did an amazing work on Mandriva and then on Mageia, when he started contributing here too.

Eugeni we will miss you so much. All our thoughts go to you wherever you are and we hope you will go on developing  and kidding there. A special thought to your beloved Vanessa.

Mageia 2 was released 2 weeks ago. The QA and security teams are working hard to fix bugs and provide security updates. It’s time now to think about our next release: no rest for the Brave!

We have now a full plan for Mageia 3, which will be released in spring 2013:

• Alpha 1: 2012/09/04
• Alpha 2: 2012/10/04
• Alpha 3: 2012/11/06
• Beta 1: 2012/12/12
• Version freeze: 2013/01/02
• Development string freeze: 2013/01/02
• Artwork freeze: 2013/01/07
• i18n freeze: 2013/01/07
• Beta 2: 2013/01/11
• Beta 3: 2013/02/12
• Release freeze: 2013/02/21
• Release Candidate:  2013/03/05
• Final release: 2013/03/20

At the moment, Mageia teams are working hard on specifications for this coming release. In order to improve the way we manage this, a  policy for proposals submission has been released. A template is now to be used so that we can make better choices, given the content of these proposals and the resources to be allocated.

The final list of specifications should be published in about one week, so stay tuned!

Solutions Linux is one of the main open source events in France. It will happen from the 19th to the 21st of June in La Defense, Paris. Mageia will have a booth in the associations village with many other open source projects.

The Mageia team will explain all about our project, the new Mageia 2 stable release and of course Cauldron and everything about open source. If you want to see our happy faces, please join us on stand B31.

And if you are not fed up with our conversation, you can also join Mageia for dinner on Tuesday, 19th of June. Please register here so that we can plan enough food :).

See you there!

Following previous blog post, Mageia 2 has been updated using original design of pr09studio. New isos have been built, tested and uploaded in public repositories.

Torrent files were also rebuilt.

So please, seeders, update your torrents by removing the old .torrent files (but dont remove the already downloaded data), and download the new .torrent files and your torrent client will resync by downloading only the changed parts.

Updates

Updated Mageia 2 and Cauldron packages are also available through usual updates.

Thanks!

Big thanks to the people who helped on providing all this in a very short time.

It has come to our attention that we have included artwork in Mageia 2 which we did not have permission to include.

We are very sorry about it – we did not know, and now that we do, we are putting it right just as fast as we can.

How?

Unfortunately we received artwork in our Mageia 2 artwork contest that the submitter had derived from an original work, that they did not have a license to use. We now realise that we need to check people’s copyright assertions more fully, and we’re working on ways to make sure we do that in future.

The Mageia 2 artwork contest clearly indicated that the proposals should be licensed under CC-By-SA, however we probably put too much trust in the people who submitted artwork for the contest, and someone submitted a background that was derived from another work.

In the future, we will be more cautious when validating the license of the submissions, asking for a more formal public statement about authorship and license, checking and publishing all source files used to create the image.

Fixing it

We have now talked with the original artist, and he has been kind enough to relicense his artwork and its derivative for use by Mageia. This means that those of us who have installed from the original Mageia 2 ISOs are not in breach of his copyright.

However, we are rebuilding the ISOs, including the Credits, to include his original artwork – which is beautiful! – and building updates to the necessary rpms. So if people download the rebuilt ISOs they will be getting the properly-licensed artwork, and if you have already installed Mageia 2, your system will be updated automatically. We will also include the updates in Cauldron.

Credit goes to pr09studio

The original artist is pr09studio, and his portfolio can be found at http://pr09studio.deviantart.com. We are very grateful to him for his understanding, and for licensing his beautiful work so we can use it.

Next

And from now on, when we are inviting people to submit artwork for inclusion in Mageia, we will be very very careful about checking that they have the rights to it!

Now feast your eyes on this…

Answer from Luiz

Here is a copy of his comment on this post to complete all this

I talked to the original artist, and I asked him apologize for the misunderstanding.

I’d like to do the same for the Mageia community, but I have no idea how I can do this.

I’ve found the background on a website, where the “artist” said he was the original creator, and I could modify the original file and I could redistriubui it again.

But that information was wrong, and I was mistaken, for he was not the true artist, and unfortunately I just found out today that the true artist is the “pr09studio” and his license does not allow what I did.

I apologize for any inconvenience caused by Mageia community, and, if possible, I’d like someone to add my words in the post above, as a way for me to apologize.

Luiz