The Manjaro Project e.V., the association formed to run the Manjaro Linux distribution apart from its commercial owner, is now a registered non-profit in Germany. The news was announced on the Manjaro forum on 13 November 2026 at 12:19 UTC. The association is registered in Berlin, has seven founding members who together form its General Assembly, and is independent of Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG, the company that still holds the project’s assets.
Frank Vandermeiren, who posts on the forum as Aragorn, wrote the announcement. The founding members are Dennis ten Hoove, Frank Vandermeiren, Jonas Strassel, Mark Wagie, Roman Gilg, Simon Büeler and Stefano Capitani, and they live in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, the United States, Switzerland and Italy. The General Assembly can invite more Assembly Members, and anyone else can sign up as a Supporting Member. The post gives no register number, and the statute has not been published.
How the split from Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG began
The registration follows the Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto, which Vandermeiren posted on 9 March 2026 for the Manjaro team, with 22 named supporters. It said the project had been in decline for a decade and had run out of money while company funds went elsewhere. It also said one person controlled the access needed to maintain the distribution and its infrastructure. The manifesto proposed that the project leave the company and become a non-profit e.V., and that the company would, over time, sit downstream of the association.
Under the manifesto, the company would license the Manjaro trademark to the association until the end of 2029 and would be willing to sell it to the association for one euro after that. The GitHub organizations, the self-hosted GitLab, the manjaro.org domain, the forum, the CDN and community funds such as OpenCollective would all go to the association. Philip Müller sits on the company’s managing board with Gilg, according to the company’s imprint, which makes Gilg both a company director and an association founder. Müller replied in the manifesto thread that he had no personal objection to an association that separated the project from the company, but said he would not take part in founding it for the time being.
No company assets have moved to the association yet, Dennis ten Hoove wrote in the announcement thread. He listed the next steps: refining the statute, inviting more members and opening a bank account in the association’s name, and only then contacting the company to start talks. He gave no dates for any of them.
According to the announcement, the team is still tuning the new development infrastructure, partly because AI-driven bot attacks on the old systems have not stopped. AI-generated load has hit other open-source work as well: in kernel development, a Linux memory-management reviewer stepped back from several roles because of AI-generated patches. Vandermeiren wrote that the Manjaro team started the latest Testing and Stable updates without supervision from Müller, and he thanked Wagie for that work. In his personal view, he wrote, this shows the distribution’s continuity is assured. He asked that further discussion of the project’s future take place in the manifesto discussion thread or in a new thread.
