14 DAY TRIAL // A few days ago, former Mandriva employees as well as community members banded together to announce the Mageia project, from the Mandriva sources which, they say, will ensure the project's survival.
Mandriva has now come out to clarify the project's future and has said that Mandriva will continue to be supported and developed on the desktop in both free and paid flavours.
"Mandriva recovered from a difficult situation. The recovery was done through restructuring the debts, a simplification of the organization, a new investor and a new strategic focus," Mandriva said in an official announcement.
"The Mandriva Community will be autonomous and governance structures will be created to ensure freedom. The Mandriva enterprise is just an element of this independent community," the announcement explained.
"A community manager will be hired by Mandriva to help the community to implement these plans. The next version of the Mandriva community distribution will be available in spring 2011," Mandriva added.
The company says that the community will be catered to as always. It also promises that development is continuing and that the next community release will come spring 2011.
Based on that, Mandriva will also release the Powerpack and the Corporate desktop versions.
Mandriva wants to make one thing clear, it plans to be the best Linux distribution based on KDE out there. However, it encourages developers to build GNOME, LXDE, XFCE and other editions around different desktop environments.
The company has also said that it plans to focus on other form factors and architectures, particularly tablets based on either Intel or ARM processors. There is also a cloud strategy as well as plans to integrate online services with the desktop edition.
Finally, Mandriva plans to continue to hire developers in several countries like Brazil, France and Russia. It remains to be seen if the reassurances actually calm down the community, but it looks like Mandriva is here to stay.