Mandriva and TurboLinux have mounted a continent-crossing charge on the Linux market. The software makers have formed a development collective dubbed Manbo-Labs dedicated to peace, harmony and a common base for their respective flavors of the Linux operating system.

More than ten people make up Manbo-Labs, which is not to be confused with the gay part of Linuxtown. These folks, along with slave labor developers, hope to craft a "common Linux base system" by April of this year.

"The new common base will be released under the GPL license, and both companies wish to open the partnership to other RPM based Linux distributions editors," the companies said.

Overall, France-based Mandriva and Japan-based TurboLinux look to share some software development costs and the hardware testing burden across two companies. ®

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