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Mandrake Linux Development Process Changes
joestar writes "Just found at MandrakeLinux.com: 'MandrakeSoft today announced a major evolution in the way that future Mandrake Linux distributions will be engineered and released. The purpose of this new development process is to provide the highest level of new features, as well as maximizing the quality of new products.' In short: for each release, there will be a 'Community' release, equivalent to a common Mandrake release, with all latest features. Several months later an 'Official' release - based on the 'Community' - will be available. Both of them will be released publicly and supported. The new process will start with the upcoming Mandrake 10.0."
Well, the community version of Mandrake is just an early build of the release. Unlike Red Hat, Mandrake is actually releasing the "official" version for public download, as it's stated "after a short delay, Mandrake Linux 10.0 Official Download Edition will be made available on public FTP mirrors". This is a signficiant difference from Red Hat's business model.
And the great thing about all this is that those who want the bleeding-edge stuff get it, and the others (e.g. newbie, corporate user, etc.) get something that's stable right out of the box. I can see this as being a great way to sort out the bugs before the corporate guys install it and toss it to the side after playing with it for 10 minutes. This way, they get something very stable and usable that could gain widespread use throughout various companies.