The Arch-based Manjaro Linux has announced that Manjaro Project e.V. is now officially registered as a non-profit in Germany and is therefore a legally separate entity from the commercial Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG.
“It is my great honor — and my equally great pleasure — to announce to you that the Manjaro Project e.V. is now an officially registered and fully legal non-profit organization in Germany, completely independent from the commercial Manjaro GmbH & Co KG company.”
The announcement is a significant step in the distribution’s ongoing restructure, coming after months of internal wrangling over who was in charge of the project, who had access to the infrastructure and who didn’t, and the relationship between the dev team and the commercial company.
The new association has seven founding members: Dennis ten Hoove, Frank Vandermeiren, Jonas Strassel, Mark Wagie, Roman Gilg, Simon Büeler and Stefano Capitani. They constitute the initial General Assembly (which may, of course, later admit further members and allow for the inclusion of further members as supporting members).
The restructuring goes back to March, when the Manjaro developers released the Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto, which was a very public critique of the way Manjaro was being run.
The document claims that decision-making has effectively become the sole domain of the project founder, Philip Müller, with the other developers having very limited access to the infrastructure. There’s also a concern about the drop in participation, the persistent technical issues, and the continued prioritization of commercial interests over the actual development of the distribution.
One of the proposed changes was to separate the community project from Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG and place its governance under an independent non-profit association. The manifesto proposed the transfer of all project infrastructure, domains, repositories and community funds to the new organization, together with arrangements for the use of the Manjaro trademark.
The contributors were warning that they might well consider forking the distro if the talks didn’t go their way. Müller then indicated that he’d be happy to talk about the proposed structure once the non-profit was in place.
The association is now formally registered, and so one of the key aims of the manifesto has been realized. The announcement does not state whether the proposed transfers of the trademarks and other assets have in fact taken place.
Perhaps the most important point is the actual evolution of the distribution. The most recent testing and stable updates were kicked off by the Manjaro team themselves, without any oversight from Müller.
This points to the developers having already started to operate on their own in an area which was previously the preserve of the project’s founder. They’re also in the process of optimizing their dev infrastructure, in part as a response to the continued automated bot attacks on the existing infrastructure.
For Manjaro users, it’s worth noting that this change doesn’t amount to a new distribution release, doesn’t in any way alter the Arch Linux base that Manjaro is built on, and doesn’t require any action on the part of the user. It’s simply a change of who runs the project, who makes the development decisions, and who controls the infrastructure that the distribution runs on.
