Today, we (Mandriva) have announced a partnership with TurboLinux, initiating our new Manbo-Labs. It is not just a press release to make some buzz, we have actually been working for a few months with TurboLinux employees. Shinji and Kiichiro (from TurboLinux) even stayed in our office in the meantime! \o/

The initial goal is to merge our basesystems components, so that we can share these same basesystem packages between Mandriva and TurboLinux. For example, the merged kernel package includes the Tomoyo security framework, and the TurboLinux installer already uses some of the merged packages (mkinitrd, bootloader-utils, ...). We are also working on merging rpm, udev, glibc and the build chain (notably gcc).

However, this joint lab does not mean that we share the agreement with Microsoft, Mandriva still tries to stay as free and open as possible, as Anne explained on the cooker ML.

It's been very nice contributing with our TurboLinux teammates, and we will undoubtedly have a whole bunch of new adventures together in the near future. Actually, we have not just been merging packages, but also food culture, and it would be quite villain not to share Surströmming with them ;-) (Oden told us that our cans would be lethal by now, but well...)