Charles-H. Schulz to assist Mandriva's open source strategy

In a blog posting on the official Mandriva blog, Charles-H. Schulz has announced that he will be assisting the company behind the Linux distribution as an advisor on open source strategy and community relations. Schulz is known for his involvement in the founding of the Document Foundation which created the LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice. He currently serves as a board member of the Document Foundation. In the past, Schulz was involved with MandrakeSoft, which later became Mandriva.

Schulz is assisting Mandriva at a time when the company is redefining how it is developing its Linux distribution. After long running financial difficulties, the company decided last month that it would hand over governance of Mandriva Linux to the community. Talking to The H, Schulz said that Mageia's growing popularity proves that Mandriva's "general model was flawed" but that the community now has the opportunity to address this.

When asked why he was joining Mandriva at this turbulent time, Schulz said: "We felt it was the right time for me to jump in, not just because of my track record but also because my experience with LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org. Time, of course, is of the essence; an awful lots of things need to be decided in the short term, but it will take quite some to see whether we made the right decision."

Update: Schulz has now announced the start of public discussions concerning plans for Mandriva Linux and how a future foundation will operate.

(fab)