Happy new year, the return of Gael Duval and an update of what I have been working on

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Hi, I know that I have been not on this forum for a while but I have been somewhat busy with a few projects.

But before I explain what I has been doing over the last couple of months, I would like to take this opportunity to wish everybody at Nethserver (both the development / administration teams and all their users) a happy new year.

Earlier today, I read an interesting article which explained that Gael Duval (the original developer of Mandrake / Mandriva) is now working on an open-source platform / distribution for mobile devices (URL provided below). Anybody who has been following some of my previous posts will know that I am a huge open source advocate (and have been using open source products since the mid / late 1990s) and will have realised that I have used a large number of different Linux distributions throughout that time.

Between 1998 to 2011 (the period that Mandrake was a viable French company), I was a big fan of the Mandrake / Mandriva project.

For a while after the death of this distribution / company, I did experiment with some of the Mandrake forks (PCLinuxOS and Mageia. Although, I never really spent that much time reviewing / using the OpenMandriva fork).

Back in the early - mid 2000s, Mandrake (a French company) did try to compete with Novel / SuSE and Redhat (the creators of the Redhat Linux Enterprise Desktop and Server) by producing a number of commercial “big-box” server, desktop (workstation) and portable (USB flash key based distribution) products.

What made Mandrake stand out from the rest of the Linux crowed was that the developers produced a well made and intuitive advanced control panel (not that dissimilar to SuSE YAST configuration / control panel).

I am very happy to see that Gael Duval is continuing with Mandrakes tradition of being innovative and is attempting to produce an open-source solution for mobile devices (I wish him the best of luck and hope that he can find a good hardware manufacturer / production house to support this project).

As for myself, over the past couple of months, I have produced and released a number of articles which examines various open source ideas and other technologies. In the next couple of months, I am intending to increase the production of these articles (and as such, I have just purchased a years subscription for a new domain name - which I am hoping to have a new website go live within the next couple of months).

In the meantime, I have released these articles on the minds.com social media platform and encourage others to spend a couple of minutes to view these posts (URL provided below).

As I have already said above, I hope that everybody had a good new year and are looking forward to 2018.

References:

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Why not write on the NethServer blog as well?
Some benefits for the project:

  • having great content about SMBs and open source
  • writings in good English :slight_smile:

Some benefits for you

  • helping the project with your amazing writing skills!
  • see your writings advertised on our channels and here
  • having a good audience that can discuss your thoughts and give you some feedback

You’re not forced to talk just about NethServer, small businesses, open souce and linux would be great topics too! What do you think?

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@alefattorini,
Thanks, I have been considering about various methods in which I can not only promote myself but also promote the various projects, developments and individuals that I support.

At the moment, I am fairly busy with mainly rebuilding my own infrastructure and as such, I don’t have any time for more then one article per week. However, I am thinking that within the next two months I will have a new website up and working (which will act as a central repository for these articles).

I am intending to tailor certain subjects for specific audiences and some of these subject may not be suitable for some forums. As an example, some of my political postings may not be suitable on Nethserver, where Minds.com would not be a suitable for some for some other topics.

As a further example, there is an article which predicts the future of Microsoft which would be unstable for this forum.

However, I have published two articles which I have just posted here, on NS. The first is an explanation about open source software and how OSS differs from free, propriety software.

The second is about the history of the open source movement. This article examines how Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation and how Linus Torvalds incorporated the Linux kernel into Richard’s software and philosophy.