Mandriva and Turbolinux Create a Joint Development Lab

Manbo-Labs is the result of a partnership between Mandriva and Turbolinux, an agreement to share resources and technology for releasing a common base system on each of the Linux distributions.

Mandriva, one of the leading companies in the European Linux arena, and Turbolinux, a reputed Linux client and server distributor in Japan and China, signed this agreement in October, last year, and they've been working together since then, keeping everything secret until now.

The team from Manbo-Labs is made up of more than ten developers from France, Japan, Brazil and also includes developers from the community. The common Linux base system is scheduled to be released this April. Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring will be based on this system and I'm sure curiosity will be the main factor in testing it. The common base will be released under the GPL license and both companies would like to open the partnership to other RPM-based Linux distributions makers.

Go Taniguchi, Turbolinux CTO said: "We are excited to partner with Mandriva and to release a common base system on each Linux distributions. We are extremely happy to be able to provide Mandriva with our resources. We are looking forward to expanding our long-standing relationship."

"We are delighted to work with Turbolinux in a partnership which will improve our Linux distributions. Meanwhile we will remain by our commitment to Open Source and our operating policies," stated Anne Nicolas-Velu, Director of Engineering at Mandriva. "This strategic partnership is a first step toward the convergence of key RPM based Linux distributions," Francois Bancilhon, Mandriva's CEO, added.

Mandriva and Turbolinux are trying for the third time to create a united Linux, hopefully this time it won't be a failure like their previous attempts. Let's see what happens in April when the Manbo-Labs project is completed.