It's Official: OpenMandriva Association Incorporated

Charles-H. Schulz has posted of the news that "OpenMandriva Association is now fully incorporated and functional." He's quite excited by the news reflected not just in his words, but the number of his posts that appeared in my feeds. I found three posts just by accident.

But Schulz' excitement is justified. This milestone officially makes OpenMandriva a community project. As Schulz said in several ways, OpenMandriva (or whatever will be the official name of the distribution) "is now legally independent and fully autonomous."

Schulz explains on the Mandriva SA Blog, "The OpenMandriva Association is a French NGO ("Association de loi 1901″) that will be in charge of representing the OpenMandriva community, to channel and attract resources and contributors."

The stated objective of the association is to facilitate the

creation, improvement, promotion and distribution of free software and open source in general, and OpenMandriva projects in particular; promoting the free exchange of knowledge and access for everyone to software and their development for personal, commercial, educational, scientific use.

On his personal blog, Schulz said it plainly, "What this means is nothing short of remarkable: We are witnessing (and in some cases such as mine, we're actually working on) the transformation of a community torn by History and years of legacy towards an independent, assertive and growing community." He said OpenMandriva is now in the "real game." Following in the footstep of Mageia, Schulz says, "should be a clear sign that the road it is taking now is the right one. I for one believe that 2013 will be the year OpenMandriva can rise and shine."

My favorite line of them all sums it up succinctly, "fundamentally, we're free."

In other OpenMandriva news, the new OpenMandriva Website is coming along slowly but surely. It's built with Drupal and will have at least 9 language translations. The only post currently published says, "the goal is to start gathering all our informations that is scattered at several places, and get it all here (at openmandriva.org), which is the domain name of the OpenMandriva association."