The Paris, France-based company said that it is extending its Cooker open source development model to improve the quality of its products by making use of the expertise of the Linux community at large.

Even though Cooker boasts a large testing audience and long beta-testing cycles, it remains impossible to test all of the various hardware and software configurations that are available on today’s complex PCs, said the company in a statement.

The new development scheme will answer the needs of both those who want all the best innovations as soon as available, even at the risk of minor glitches, and those who don’t mind to wait and prefer improved reliability.

Since 1999 the company has made the Cooker test version of its Linux development available to about 1,000 contributors before the Cooker development is frozen and the result is distributed to a traditional beta testing program. Having been through beta testing the final product was then released a download and in commercial retail packs.

Under the new development plan that final release, beginning with the forthcoming Mandrake Linux 10.0, will be known as the Community version. Mandrake Linux 10.0 Community will be released in February or March and will be the version aimed at users wanting the latest features.

Once version 10.0 Community is released a Mandrake Linux 10.0 Stable branch of the code tree will be opened which will provide security updates and bug fixes to the community in real time.

The company will continue to produce a version of Mandrake Linux for users wanting stability, rather than the latest features. Due for release in April or May Mandrake Linux 10.0 Official will be packaged up from the Stable branch and include updates developed after the Community release.

The scheme is similar to a change made by Red Hat Inc in July 2003 when it converted the Red Hat Linux standard product to the Fedora Linux community project. As well as being Red Hat’s Linux community development version, Fedora also forms the base of its commercial Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server products.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire