Charles Schulz, of Libreoffice, Openoffice fame, has recently joined the Mandriva Recovery Team; a part of his inaugural task list was this particular blog post on the Mandriva blog where he called on the Linux community for help. The help he needs is simple; Mandriva needs input from the community to guide the future development of the distro to operate with complete transparency and embracing a maritocratic business model.

His blog post helped to humanize him in my eyes is a way that most executives and business types fail to accomplish. I think regardless of whether you use Mandriva or even Mageia, if you are a Linux appreciator and have programming knowledge and the capacity to help, we definitely should show some solidarity in the Linux community by donating a few hours of our time at least, and maybe help save the people that put so much effort into laying the path for us in the early days of Linux.

This summed up Charles’s Message for me:

Mandriva as a company cannot define this foundation on its own; certainly not without its community and its contributors. What is needed here is input. A workgroup of various contributors from various parts of the community is being formed as I write and a physical meeting shall take place in Paris some time during the month of June (more info on that later). But what is needed is the input from everyone.

The way he proposes we get this input to him is through the mailing list he has set up and I have linked to below. Please consider donating a few hours, a few days, a few tweets or a few opinions to the cause to help save one of the father-distributions of this great distro we love so much. I’ve linked the mailing list below for your convenience, please use the share buttons for this page located at the bottom of the article to spread the word to the surrounding Linux communities.

Join the mailing list
https://ml.mandriva.com/wws/info/foundation