1) Hi Per Øyvind. Part of the Mandriva community already knows > you, but could you quickly introduce yourself ?

Well, I started out as a linux user back in 98 or so, first distro I barely played with back then first was RedHat? 4.2, and then with RedHat? 5.1 or so I think I really got turned on, then 5.2 and then I eventually got around to try Linux-Mandrake 5.3. I wasn't a dedicated Mandrake user quite yet then and did some distro hopping back and forth between RedHat?, Gentus (Abit's RedHat? based Linux distro with some special stuff for their mobo's which was nice since I was an owner of the (in)famous Abit BP6 dual FCPGA mobo with a 2x533 celly, ahh, the nostalgia.. ;), then I landed back on Mandrake again for good at 7.0, 7.1 or so.

My second year at high school my field of study was computer science (very simple compared to college/university of course;), and since my skills were already far above the corriculum I was pretty much allowed to work on my own projects at school. Since thin clients and terminal servers with linux were starting to get a hot topic back then with SkoleLinux? (Norwegian equivalence of debian-edu, I think it's among the primary driving forces behind it actually, with funding from the government) making it's way into school, this was an interesting topic for me as well. Basically the Debian amish kde 2.2 desktop with extremely poor user friendliness compared with the Mandrake Linux terminal server with KDE 3 and the sysadmin at school were intrigued by how superior this was, and with his motivation I started commiting a lot of time at school working on improving these things. My first package that made it to cooker actually came out of this, which was 'nas', a network audio server that together with arts provided sound for the clients over the network, and that started to get the ball rolling with contributions to the distribution. After finishing that year of school I started up an ISP company with another person where in addition to delivering G.SHDSL internet connection to customers, we also provided services such as server hosting etc. and we planned on providing terminal server services. This made me start on focusing on translations as well, and as we ran Mandrake Linux on all our servers and recommended it to our customers for the servers we hosted, it accelerated my contributions to the distribution further (we even hosted a plf mirror at  ftp://plf.delonic.biz at that time;). I eventually left the company due to conflicts and I was generally getting bored with network and sysadmin work and wanted to get back to school and focus more on development (best choice I ever made!:), but I had started to get really involved in cooker then, especially after Lenny suggested creating a contributor account for me after spamming him with several packages a day for some weeks. :o)

Whoa, that was quite extensive coverage of my initial (personal) background, so let's move on to the rest of the more Mandriva specific one. ;p

Some of the stuff I am or has been working on: * Norwegian Bokmål (nb) translator and coordinator keeping it clean and mostly at 100% since 9.1, mostly by myself * Used to focus a lot of games and similar in the distribution, probably responsible for Mandrake Linux having the very best quality and selection of games back in those days. :) * Together with Stefan and Olivier I revived the sparc port, and maintained it (a bit on and off) since 2003. Portability has been an area of interest in general so this work together with others has sure helped out other and more recent ports as well. :) * I used to maintain and deal with some houndred packages on regular basis, probably being the most active contributor at one period. * I was hired for doing club packaging back in 2005, this work was more or less extended to do some community related work, getting more contributors involved by tutoring and interacting with them, maintaining the Norwegian Mandriva Linux community forum, wiki etc. This sort of work has become a more interesting area since than just packaging. * RPM! I've been very passionate in everything related to rpm since I got involved with contributing, over the past couple of years I've also become more active in contributing to development of tools such as smart, urpmi (ie. I was the one implementing the initial metalink stuff;) and rpm itself, being among the most active developers at rpm5.org upstream. (and yes, I think it's a real shame that Mandriva switched to rpm.org ;p). * LZMA, I've been helping out on development of xz/liblzma (formerly known as lzma utils) and implemented support for it to push for it's adoption in as many places as possible and also written more complete software such as pylibzlma python module. (new xz tools just entered beta stage on new years eve btw!!:D)

Other than Mandriva Linux, I do spend a lot of time on other free software projects as well. One of my favorites and that I've spent quite some time on is Doon Lunacy ( http://launchpad.net/doonlunacy, formarly known as Dune Legacy), which is a free clone which implements an engine which reuses the Dune 2 game data to provide newer features such as multiplayer, high resolution, multiple unit selection+++, and whenever I get some time again, I hope to release a new playable version as our game engine is starting to get pretty nice. :D

Well, I guess that should introduce myself well enough, even if not "quickly". (I'm such an attention whore ;)

> 2) You may not be aware yet, but this magazine is now published by the > new "Association des Utilisateurs Francophones de Mandriva Linux" > (French-speaking Mandriva Linux Users Association). Although the > French-speaking Mandriva community has always been very active, there > was no formal association before. It's a similar situation for the > international community and I've heard rumors about a fondation, do you > know more about it ?

Yes, this was something that we kinda got started trying at which got started by a talk/discussion I held at the Mandriva devroom at FOSDEM 2007. People was very interested and excited about trying to revive the old foundation idea after that and quite a lot of discussions took place and things seemed to be within reach then with about everyone being positively interested and giving it their support. Unfortunately even if support could be found even at the top level of the company, available resources were lacking. To my experience this was mainly resources in the form of the right people with the required dedication and interest in these fields. The cooker community has a lot of people involved doing a lot of good work, but most people's motivation and interest is in technical fields etc., and there's a real lack of people with interest, skills and experience in organization of projects still present. So since I had some health problems at the time and there was some changes in the company and a lot of other stuff going on, things kinda died out back then.

So a few months after the previous efforts died out I started rethinking the approach taking the challenges and issues experienced into consideration. As organization of a foundation with the cooker community seemed to be too hard without more people dedicated or the company fully involved I figure that uniting some synergies with some other project ideas and efforts of mine would be a better way.

Mandriva Linux lacks resources in many other places technically as well, this is something that Manbo Labs is targetting, unfortunately it's scope is limited to only collaboration on certain components of the distribution and also restricted to commercial partnerships with other distributions which presents participation from other community distributions. So through my involvement in rpm5.org I've been in touch with several other distributions using rpm to form a community distribution project which is kinda like the community counterpart of Manbo Labs, but with a greater scope covering collboratio of a full distribution, community, tools ++ between several and open to any distribution. Starting with a project of a more technical nature and where it's easy to get something in place to give it some substance is a lot easier! Once you get the initial things in place, more people gets interested and easier involved and able to make use of it and from there you get the ball rolling. So my plan is from there and together with several other distributions create a foundation, sharing the efforts between the communities will provide it with a lot more resources and also with it being more driven by pure community distributions in addition there will be more need and interest for organizing a foundation with more people who already has experience and the necessary dedication to do this, something which is different from a distribution with a commercial company behind which takes care of the organization.

I think this approach is far more interesting and beneficial than the initial idea of a exclusive Mandriva foundation as it opens and helps out several distributions, gives it more appeal, more influence, more diversity, more community interaction, easier to get funding+++. Also focusing on the foundation being european in contrast to other projects such as Debian and Fedora is also a major benefit for many, many reasons..

So far this is my proposed idea and what I've been working on and the project is alive and progressing. Mandriva's involvement in this is still undetermined and something I've been working a bit on lately. There is interest, so I have hope, and to be honest this is the only solution I see for Mandriva to deal with many of it's difficulties on many levels so I personally can't see any reason for not wanting to join in on this. But there's a lot of stuff that is going on these days, especially with the new CEO, while the previous was very interested in the foundation idea, I don't really have any knowledge of the new one's view on it. And the very sudden and vague announcement of the communtiy steering committee is something that I'm still puzzled by, but I did at least make sure of being "bold" enough to suggest myself among representant for involvement from cooker to be sure to get the best of it and try share our goals. The distribution collaboration project is anyways alive with efforts progressing independent of Mandriva participation and I will hopefully announce some initial stuff sometime soon. :)

> 3) I have the feeling Mandriva has never found its market. What's the > main target for Mandriva : companies, OEM, beginners, geeks ?

All of them, but one of the biggest problems Mandriva has had from the start is PR, with image and visibility being on a negative curve since it's glory back in 2000. Back then Mandriva was the leader outselling RedHat? on the desktop and gaining in on the enterprise side, where it was second to RedHat?, a position it competed with SuSE for. At that time the userbase was also a bit different, people were a lot more used to systems that weren't user friendly, with many being negative towards anything looking cute and being easy as something that could only be used by newbies, luckily the era of ignorant, "l33t" Slackware users bashing "n00b" distributions etc. is over, but Mandriva never really succeeded in marketing itself properly in the enterprise market or gain trust by the geeks.

I personally think among the biggest reasons for this was that MandrakeSoft? USA were shut down and funds spent on these things were severly cut with extremely little priority given as there seemed to be severe obliviousness about it. Over the recent years Mandriva has more and more built itself an image more resembling an ogre than the truly loved free software company back then which also donated a percentage of all it's income to free software projects and allowed for their employees to spend a day week working on other free software projects. Looking back at the archives at sites like Slashdot etc. back in 2001, 2002 etc. you'll see that MandrakeSoft? back then had kinda the same favorable impression from the free software community that Ubuntu has today.. From what I've seen, it seems like Mandriva has only managed to establish itself as a serious enterprise vendor in France, and now Brazil due to the Conectiva acquisition, throughout the rest of the world it seems to be struggling hard. This also seems to be true for the community part, from what I've seen there's only in France there's an organized user community of significance. So the issue seems like Mandriva has completely lacked awareness about it's visibility and all outside of France. Also as Mandriva hasn't given the community full freedom to promote and organize itself, it's become a bottleneck preventing it's growth and promotion which it could've been a lot more succesful at by itself. This is also something I think that has been the main reason for not having the same appeal towards the geeks and developers such as Debian has had. This is something that's quite sad and ironic as cooker has been far more open to developers with extremely far less burecracy than Debian (or any of of the alternatives), making it extremely easy for people to get involved and participate in the distribution, but who knows about it? Yet again, very poor marketing..

But to give more of an answer for your actual question, I think it now today, especially since user friendliness and nice desktops isn't a taboo anymore and more "dumbed down" distros focusing on user friendliness such as Ubuntu, I'd say the main target (where it visibly succeeds) is the beginners which wants a user friendly distribution without the cost of features, while also regular to advanced power users, especially those who prefers a KDE desktop.

> 4) If you were Mandriva's CEO, what would be your first move ?

Well, I've already outlined many of the biggest issues I see already, so certainly these, but the very first thing would be to help realize the foundation securing and reaffirming it's community, distribution, customers++ while cutting costs and maintenance work.

> 5) What are the biggest challenges for Mandriva in the future ?

Hm.. Ubuntu? ;p Hehe, or to be more serious, learning from Ubuntu and also from the mistakes of itself in the past to regain trust, visibility, appeal and image. Without doing this, Mandriva will just keep on failing and failing and failing as it's pretty much done over the last years. In stead of frequently trying to find new ideas, products, services and various ways to stay aflot and generate income, the company needs to gain self-awareness and actually fix what's broken in stead of working around it any possible way in denial of the real problems.

> 6) Now talking about the distribution itself, what are its main strong > and weak points ?

The biggest strong point I see is it being an european and *very* open distribution with very little bureacracy, looking at other distributions with their main base being in the US such as Fedora and Debian, they're plagued by extreme amounts of burecracy, politics and ego issues hurting progression and effectivity. In cooker I'm able to do pretty much whatever I want since I'm trusted and know what I do, this goes for others as well, it's all based on trust, people builds up trust to get contributor access, then they're trusted to don't do anything malicious, not to mess with things that they shouldn't and that they're able to contribute a lot more when there's not any layers of bureacracy getting in the way or people being overly possessive about *owning* packages. After all, Mandriva has always had a pretty puny amount of contributors/developers compared to other distributions which often has like only a handful of packages per maintainer, where in Mandriva we have "only a handful" of maintainers which maintains extreme amounts of packages each compared with also the ability to work on other packages as well. This is something I think has made Mandriva Linux able to compete with others even if the amount of resources has been dramatically smaller and also the reason for why I wouldn't want to get involved with any of the other distributions.

This is also the weak point, that is the lack of resources which I believe is much caused by the lack of same freedom on the non-technical aspects, that is much of the organization is controlled by Mandriva..

> 7) Some say the drakxtools should be deprecated and using upstream > tools would be better, what's your answer to this ?

I'm afraid I share much of that view..

There's been a lot of mentality behind the development of the tools that all developers at Mandriva or with interest in development of the tools works at the same office. As one of it's developers said on the list a while back is that there used to be like 20 persons working on them at the office and when you wondered about something you could always ask the person at the next desk about something rather than referring to extensive documentation etc. This also seems to affect the efforts spent on promoting the tools to and adopted by others, the tools are pretty much all stored in the same svn repository as everything else making them more of a distribution exclusive thing with no proper project pages or public releases outside of the distribution. If there had been better ability at giving the development of the tools some community thinking I'm sure these tools would've been far more succesful as becoming standard upstream tools and not ending up in competition with these tools which has far more developers, users and better integration and in most cases progressing steadily towards becoming better than the existing Mandriva alternatives. There's also the case of the tools being written in perl and IMO perl is almost kinda a deprecated language itself which has lost a lot of it's popularity among developers of free software used by Linux distributions, this is not only due to so many perl developers have their own opinion about what's good coding styles making it harder to maintain, and it seems a bit obscure for users of other languages, but also because there hasn't been a new major version of perl in over ten years and while other languages such as python has advanced and gained adoption rapidly. Perl 6 is still not there providing functionality in nice and clean ways that others has taken for granted in other languages for many years already.. (I know someone is gonna disagree and hate my guts for such claims, but those are mostly perl people anyways.. ;p)

For me I've focused a bit on other alternatives since I care more about something that's not exclusive to Mandriva, easy collaboration with others, and finally that's also not written in perl. :p I prefer languages such as C, C++ and python myself. :)

Related to this I did the initial Mandriva adaptions and plugin for networkmanager which I got merged upstream, I've spent quite a lof of work on smart and porting urpmi functionality and Mandriva compatibility over the last year, etcetc.

> 8) Do you think introducing KDE4.1 in 2009.0 was a good thing ?

Yes, it needed to be introduced sooner or later anyways, introducing it helped a lot on getting many of the bugs and adapting it and all which Mandriva Linux will benefit from in the next release, just as upstream and other distributions. But there was some unforgivable bugs that made it throught to 2009.0 though, these bugs I noticed myself weren't even there like a 2-3 months before 2009.0 release with even earlier prereleases of kde not having them and being more stable. I was very satisfied with KDE 4.1 in the mid of 2009.0 dev cycle, but I wasn't very active in cooker participation for 2009.0 and didn't really stay updated on cooker much of the time, so when I started updating the last month before I was really scared about how unstable and messy things had become.. :/

> 9) How would you compare Mandriva Linux to what seems to be its main > competitor : Ubuntu ?

Hmm.. So many has done already, hehe, I don't know what more I can say that could be considered as anything new of interest.. But as already said, Mandriva is a lot more open and should appeal to devels a lot more, unfortunately it doesn't., Ubuntu simply is a lot better at organizing community stuff, inheriting a lot of this from Debian, while solving much of the issues with Debian mentioned above. So this is independent of Mark Shuttleworth being it's sugar daddy making it able to spend so much on marketing and all, I think this is more of a true cause for much of it's success and something that it should be applauded for (personally this is the only thing I applaud and feel like giving them real credit for.. ;). $$$ sure did help a *LOT* though, but I don't think we should tell this is why Ubuntu has become more succesful, we need to see the whole picture, especially in those areas where we can compete in stead of saying that Canonical has ~infinite cash and we can't compete with that and stick our head in the ground. If we could stop fool ourself and dening a lot of the realities that is the biggest issues, then I think we could actually have a *very* good chance to compete with Ubuntu, I've suggested a lot on this already, and I think there's a lot of people who starts to get sick of the hype around and zealot disciple evanglism of Ubuntu, which is to our benefit, especially since people love to cheer for the underdog. We also have a longer history and a brand which people feels a lot of nostalgy about, solving the issues that made many of our fans leave is sure to hit the weak spot of many and cause the return of many former users. :)

> 10) Although Mandriva has always provided a > Free edition since the beginning of the company and it's even the base > of all the other editions, Mandriva Linux is still seen as a non-100% > free distribution. How do you explain this ?

Poor marketing/visibility, I kinda explained this above, so I guess there's no need to answer this one again. :)

> 11) Adam Williamson and Oden Eriksson contracts have not been > renewed by Mandriva and they were two major contributors to the distribution. > What is your feeling about this ?

Well, I was among the contractors being terminated last year, and I know the feeling they have.. I didn't really consider my termination as that important as others like ie. Wobo's which I felt strongly about and really stupid move towards Mandriva visibility and sales in Germany. With this round I feel definitively the same for Adam, but on a lot more global level which makes it more critical. For Oden it's very sad and will hurt the server side a lot since he's been maintaning so much of the server software keeping them in such a nice shape, and Oden is among the few people who were involved with the distribution already when I got involved ages ago, so I sure do get sentimental about such departures.

I must point out a technical detail though, the term contractor is kinda only a formal term describing remote workers outside of France or Brazil which doesn't have the same usual rights, services and all that you usually have as a regular employee. I never even saw the term really used before some of us got laid of last year, to me and everyone else we've all been equivalent employees. So the real difference about contractors is that they're easily disposed without any hazzle for the company, there wasn't any contract that weren't renewed or anything suggesting "contractors" working on consulting basis only for a limited period of time, what's really been ended is the employment relationship. I think this is important to point out as I've seen people suggesting and also others kinda using it as an excuse for these people only being contractors and not like actual employees that could expect anything from the company, something I find a bit offensive..

> 12) On which activity related to Mandriva will you likely focus on in 2009 ?

RPM, cross distro collaboration and community. :)

> 13) Thanks Per. I hope we'll see each other at the FOSDEM next February, I've > heard you often attend this event and I'll be there too !

I don't really have obtained any funding for it and I'm quite broke, but I *really* want to go as it's so nice going there and meeting all the people you interact with over the net all year and also meeting new and interesting people and all. It's a very social event and I've made myself a new years resolution about getting more social this year, so I'm gonna do all I can to get there. So I hope to see you too this year! :)