After our first release we’ve received few questions about how OpenMandriva content differs from Rosa’s, and the nature of the relationship between OpenMandriva, ROSA and Mandriva SA?
Technically speaking, OpenMandriva and ROSA share a common basic codebase as do all linux distributions. OMA and ROSA teams work in close cooperation exchanging code in both directions which constantly improves and maintains this shared base.
This is the concept behind FLOSS: to be able to take someone’s work and quite effortlessly rebuild it elsewhere thus these similarities are natural for any FLOSS based distribution.
This commonality of code doesn’t result in OpenMandriva and ROSA being the same; far from it in fact, “OpenMandriva Lx 2013.0” has unique features such as a more complete implementation of the KDE stack which includes kmail, krita, amarok. It is built with a newer toolchain that takes advantage of some of the latest optimisations. We use glibc-2.18 and are progressing well down the path of support for the ARM architecture. Much of our additional code is directed toward optimisation of the KDE Desktop. A newer kernel release which supports later hardware and that is tweaked for desktop use. Speedy booting is aided by systemd-208 integration. We also include an enhanced printing stack.
It is hard to compare OpenMandriva, a community organized and built system, with that of ROSA a rock solid commercial distribution. Their aims and usage are different. OpenMandriva Cooker will always be a balance between cutting edge elements and new ideas and the need for stability and simplicity – and ROSA, being a commercial company, needs to carefully implement only fully tested and reliable components to ensure maximum stability for their user base.
So it can be seen that a shared code base can be directed to achieve different results: such are the benefits of cooperative effort brought about by the FLOSS approach.
This goes some way to explain the working relationship between OpenMandriva and ROSA as
OpenMandriva builds a distribution in a manner that targets the aspects which its members need and desire. Should a commercial company find the features of our OpenMandriva appealing – they support us, which we welcome, as this allows us to continue to build and improve the OpenMandriva distribution in our own unique and collaborative way.
We hope that in the future other companies may find our efforts to produce a modern and innovative system so appealing they will wish to emulate us.
The real strength of OpenMandriva though is in our ideals. We are in the process of creating
an international distribution where we are directing our efforts to work to professional standards. This is a hard and difficult task in the naturally anarchic world of Open Source but we hope one day people who have contributed to OpenMandriva will find it serves as a passport to work on high visibility projects. We invite you to join us; it will be a bumpy road at first but the more help we have the smoother will be the ride…