Headquartered in Paris, France, Mandriva S.A. is a Linux and open source software company with a development center in Curitiba, Brazil. It is also known as the creator and maintainer of the Mandriva Linux distribution.

Recently, one of Mandriva's officials released an announcement according to which it has closed a partnership with MetaNav for developing and distributing customized Mandriva Linux applications for the Asian market.

"Open source is booming in East Asia, and in Korea in particular. Mandriva will work in close collaboration with MetaNav to provide Mandriva Linux solutions to Korean people, and we are looking forward to taking part in this transition process" stated Gaurav Parakh, Mandriva Partnership Manager.

The partnership targets mainly the organizations but also people all over South Korea and the East Asia area. Among the highlights of this agreement, I could count the Co-development of an enhanced Mandriva Linux customized for the Asian market, the offer of training and support for organizations, people and associates in the Asian region and the attempt to make Mandriva products available through local OEMs and VARs.

According to some market studies and analyses, it seems that more than 35% of the servers in Korean government offices were using in 2006 Linux-based operating systems and their annual usage increasing rate is said to reach more than 10%. In addition, the Korean government announced it intends to start switching this year to open source alternatives on a substantial number of its PCs and servers, and thus offer its support for the open source initiative.

You can read more about Mandriva's partnership with MetaNav on Mandriva's official website. According to the website, the announcement mentioned here comes right after the release of Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring, Mandriva Flash 4GB and Corporate Desktop 4.0 as a reinforcement of Mandriva's and MetaNav's commitment to the East Asian open source community.