Vive le printemps! (about Spring, Mandriva and the Community)

Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring is now released for a few weeks. The 2007 Spring is probably one of the best Mandriva Linux release in years and I want to thank all the teams, and also particularly all the cooker contributors, who have worked for long months on this project.

The distribution is solid and has greatly benefited from the additional 2 weeks of tests we put into polishing the result. And it shows: reviews are good and sales are solid.

We are now taking a short break before the next run: Mandriva Linux 2008. But during this break, we are making several changes in preparation for the next release.

First, I'm reorganizing the teams in the Engineering, promoting Anne Nicolas as Engineering Director. Anne was previously leading the Corporate team. She brings not only strong professionalism, but also a clear community minded approach. She will involve all the engineers in the Brazilian team, who can now play a central role in building the distribution. She will be in charge of the development of all the Mandriva Linux releases.

Second, Anne is working with the teams to draft the technical roadmap for the 2008 release. This roadmap will also contain a set of guidelines for contributors work. This is the starting point for discussing and adopting requirements expressed by the Cooker community.

Third, Anne will organize the work and enhance the Mandriva policy for contributors.

Mandriva is proud and honored to have one of the oldest free software community for distribution editors, one of the largest and one of the most open, with key contributors working on many of the core modules of the release. Anne will ensure that this ecosystem continues to grow, opens even more, and also that interactions are better formalized without breaking the fun in the game ;)

On this occasion, I'm proposing a further step and wish that the next Free Software version of Mandriva Linux be made directly by a member of the community.

Last, build platform improvements will also be resumed now that the release is out. Phase 1 was about stabilizing things, so let's head for Phase 2 and implement some much needed changes!

In short, some changes and a lot of new exciting work, so: Vive le Printemps!

(Note: this message has also been cross-posted to the cooker mailing list)