Mageia joins Open Invention Network

Posted on January 8, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

Mageia.org has just joined Open Invention Network as a licensee.

Software patents are a threat to Free Open Source Software development and to free innovation at large.

OIN‘s goal is to minimize/eliminate software patent threats within the Linux ecosystem. It helps by insuring confidence, free innovation and growth within the Linux stack by taking a collaborative and defensive stance against software patents.

OIN provides its members and licensees with the means to:

  • Cross-license to each other, at no cost, their patents relative to Linux;
  • Benefit from OIN-owned pool of patents,
  • Gather forces and defend against software patent threats.

While this doesn’t resolve the question of software patents, it is a great help to defend against those sorts of threats. Mageia.Org strives to understand, design, experiment and release software to empower people in their daily lives; software patents are not going to help in this regard. So we welcome OIN and any other initiative that may help reducing software patents impact and abuses.

OIN members include Sony, IBM, NEC, Red Hat, Philips, Novell. OIN licensees include Canonical, Fluendo, GNOME, Google, KDE, Mozilla, OpenMoko, Oracle, Tom Tom, and many others.

Note that OIN is not alone, only relates to the Linux system and is not the only way to silence software patents, where they are effectively valid; see:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Happy new Mageia

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

First, let’s get the niceties out of the way… the Mageia team would like to wish you all a very happy New Year, for you and your families :D. We really hope that 2011 will be the Mageia year for users, contributors and partners so that we can propose and promote a rock solid and innovative open source environment.

While we are speaking about the future, the new year comes with the start of the real work!

Packaging

During past Wednesday’s packagers’ meeting, Mageia packaging tasks have been launched. First packages will be imported in the coming days by about 40 packagers. This goes together with starting the mentoring of new packagers so that every proposal of contributions we received since the beginning can turn into a positive effort. You can join the #mageia-mentoring channel on the Freenode IRC network to discuss all aspects of this subject. In the mean time, 2 representatives have been elected for the packaging team leadership.

Our Buildsystem, which is a corner stone of the project, is being updated/wrapped up by the sysadmin team and with the great help of Pascal Terjan (if you meet him, be sure to buy him a beer :)). We will give you more details about the buildsystem deployment later on.

Translations

In the translators/i18n team, basic steps of building up the translation process and workflow have been made. Currently teams are establishing two general translation workflows (one with Transifex and one without it) and we will be ready to start soon. The i18n teams expect that once the whole infrastructure is set (soon) that they’ll gather more contributors to join the teams, former experts and new volunteers alike. In short: i18n is on track!

Web

The Web team is still lagging a bit behind schedule for the new Wiki and Forum instances launch. But this will be done this month, January. The whole infrastructure is making progress slowly (Bugzilla, www, maintainers, account management, calendar, code repositories).

Communication & Marketing

Well… as you may see, we are not very active yet on this, although it is building up slowly as well. Once we have a product ready to be put out the door, marketing will start in earnest.

Alpha 0 release

So we are on track for our first technical release this month. As announced before, of course, do not expect this alpha release to be more than what it is: an alpha release. Things will be way more interesting in the coming months.

FOSDEM

On February 5th and 6th, some of us will meet at FOSDEM in Brussels and will enjoy meetings and discussions with a lot of other happy Free Software hackers!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Comments

First packagers meeting for Mageia

Posted on December 18, 2010 by Anne Nicolas

The first packagers’ meeting took place the last Wednesday on the #mageia-dev IRC channel on Freenode. About 25 people attended, and many proposed to help both experienced and beginner packagers. Almost 2 hours of constructive discussion, here’re the logs and links to pertinent threads on the mageia-dev mailing list:

Of course if you are interested in contributing in the packaging team, you can still register here. You can attend packagers’ team meetings every Wednesday at 20h UTC in the #mageia-dev IRC channel on Freenode. These meetings should be rather short, around 1/2h. The main goal will be to review ongoing actions based on a pre-defined list of topics (this list will be posted to the mageia-dev mailing list).

Work is now focused on documentation: the Mageia packaging policies and laying out the mentoring process of new packagers.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

They speak about Mageia

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Anne Nicolas

While the Mageia team is working hard on making the build system available for packagers and teams are being setup, thanks to volunteers, various media are already speaking about our project. They asked some Mageia team members to give some more information about the reasons and the organization of Mageia.

Thanks a lot to Dimitrios, Olivier, Maarten, Fabio, MacXi, Gonzalo, Wobo for their big work translating parts of these articles.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Translators on the track

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Anne Nicolas

Thanks to the tremendous efforts of the core team, we will soon be ready to start real work on Mageia. Time to get the supporting teams together. Last Thursday the international i18n team had its initial meeting. Topics were the necessary organisational steps for the international coordination group and the teams for each language. Despite the problem of different time zones we had a good start and will be ready for the show.

People interested in translating, join us! Have a look at the i18n wiki page and the pages of your language team. Contact the team of your language and help users in your country to
get an easier access to Mageia!

Wobo

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments