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Mandrake Shakeup
An AC submitted this sad news: "NewsForge has a couple of articles on a management shakeup and more at French Linux distribution Mandrake. The CEO, CIO, CTO and others, including most of the IS team, have been let go. Others have taken voluntary pay cuts or cuts in their work hours. Ouch!" Several of the slashdot staff are big Mandrake fans; I hope they can keep going in the face of adversity.
They haven't burned through all of that capital yet. Ultimately, I am afraid they will...
While it's hard to predict the future, Red Hat is currently breaking even. Which implies that they aren't burning through anything...
Money and distribution is important, but its also not fair to be charging for other people's work, and essentially making them pay for it. No one would help on any of their projects if they did that, and it would be essentially like stepping back to a closed source model.
Think of charging for a distro as charging for the work that went into putting the distro together and creating whatever glue it took to make it all work. If you consider what it would cost to get the same things from MS, you will see that $70 really is more like charging for putting it together (>$$$ for OS, >$$$$$ for various compilers, $$$ for web server, $$$$$$$$$$$ for unlimited no questions asked site license).
Is it the way some of these companies market themselves, which is close to zero when it comes to mainstream magazines
I think that is close to the mark. Potential users just don't know what Linux has to offer them. If they will listen, I find that a few minutes of education and evaluation of their current usage is enough to get them to try Linux.
Personally, I like Debian, but I recommend Mandrake to beginners. It is easier to install than windows, and comes with decent defaults for a workstation. The GUI config tools are pretty good as GUI config tools go.
Actually, I tend to agree that the usual plan is to get cut the sales staff when sales are down, but this sounds sensible, if it's merely for financial reasons. It comes from a (foreign to USians) simple theory that if the company is failing, it is being mismanaged, so management is to blame.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
You mean that keeping the source code locked up and secret would save us from this apocalypse? Maybe you should tell those BSD people. They give the code away too!
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
I think providing free downloads before it hits the shelves is just plain dumb. Dists should at least allow a few weeks where its only available in stores before providing free downloads, especially of the ISOs themselves.
Engineering and the Ultimate
"People go to Redhat because they want Linux solutions, not because they think it's a service"
I think you are misunderstanding the idea behind "service". Solutions are a service.
GPL is not aimed at removing ownership, it's aimed at removing ownership of software.
Lawyers do not _own_ the arguments they come up with, but they are paid enormous amounts of money to come up with them. Once the arguments are made, they are public record, and anyone can use them again. Yet lawyers get more money than just about anyone else.
As long as software creates solutions for problems, developers will be paid, even if the final results are freely available.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Why do you say that? Many people who don't work for software companies get paid developing free software. If you work in an IT department and contribute code to the projects you use, you are getting paid for writing free software.
Engineering and the Ultimate
... if you use Mandrake, buy it. Especially if you're an overpaid sysadmin that uses it to make impossible things look effortless. That goes for any distro, any flavor.
.ca than the actual discs!!). I could afford it, so I did. Good karma all around.
I just paid for my 8.0 powerpack preorder, and when I built an OpenBSD firewall I bought my copy of 2.7 (and paid more for the shipping from
Oh, and please save your mod points for good comments like this one.
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
Because Mandrake may be easy to install, but it's even easier to just keep the Windows 9x that was installed when you bought your computer.
Hoping to capture the desktop in a sudden coup is overly optimistic.. Slow and steady progress will earn Linux's share, just like the last ten years.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Mandrake may be targeted at newbies, but it's a good distribution for experienced users too. I'm not interested in all the icky graphical setup crap; what matters is that Mandrake has a better collection of packages than Red Hat, and they seem to be generally of higher quality. Plus things like Pentium optimization and ReiserFS, which while not essential are nice cherries on the cake.
Of course Debian has an even better set of packages - but I've had an irrational fear of Debian ever since installing with dselect a couple of years ago.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
BS rules?
Allright, lets try to continue this metaphor then...
We pay taxes to the government, they provide us with services in return (roads, police, armed forces, the Smithsonian, tax shelters for the rich, etc.). In exchange for giving the government money, they try to make sure we're not invaded (I hear Canda has 90% of their population amassed within 100 miles of the border as we speak).
We can also pay money to Redhat, and they provide us with services in return (updates, support, etc.). In exchange for giving Redhat money, they try to insure we're not cracked.
The GPL does not prevent the charging of fees for service, but it does give more power to the consumer than many companies are comfortable with.
Let's hammer this metaphor to death. What if the Constitution had been proprietary? Right off, the Bill of Rights and addition amendments wouldn't exist, as users wouldn't be able to add onto the Constitution. On the other hand, the US government could have made a fortune licensing the technology known by the internal code named "Democracy" to other countries. Then again, Greece might of had prior art....
Ah, but Mandrake would have never existed if Redhat wasn't, in turn, GPL! I actually used Mandrake 5.3, and as many people here know, it was just Redhat 5.2 (same installer, same everything) with KDE added in and a couple of updates.
Granted, the fact that Mandrake could just take Redhat 5.2 and sell a better version of it speaks against the GPL from the business standpoint, but that frame of thinking is the wrong way to look at the GPL. The GPL isn't about protecting business rights, it's about protecting the consumers.
Try to think of the United States Bill of Rights as a metaphor for the GPL. The Bill of Rights is stupid from a governmental perspective. Citizens who can speak out against the government? Citizens who can't be coerced into testifying against themselves? Citizens who can carry their own weapons? (allright, that one's pretty stupid today, but it made a lot of sense in the 1700's). The Bill of Rights isn't for the government, it's for the people. It helps keeps government honest, open, and democratic, and it assures citizens of their rights and freedoms.
In turn, we shouldn't expect business to have to justify the use of the GPL, rather, it should be consumers that demand the use of the GPL, and business in turn respecting their customer's wishes and needs.
There are quite a few other channels for support besides Mandrake Expert. There are the Mandrake Expert Mailing list, the Mandrake Newbie Mailing list, alt.os.linux.mandrake, and so on.
Their pay schemes have not yet been implemented, and I would be surprised if they ever are.
Believe me, mandrakeexpert is just as frustrating for the experts. We get bombarded with questions like, "Can I get AOL on Mandrake?" "I want to set up a home LAN." So, yes, there is a difference between end-users and experts.
Trying to blame mandrakeexpert for what is going on at MandrakeSoft is like trying to blame Slashdot for what happens to LNUX.
Well at least you're not denying we're a business success. And of course we're entirely GPL.
:-) is irrelevent.
You're making progress..... Now you've got to make the mental leap that Samba, like most GPL software is a *solution* to someone's problem. One that they're willing to pay for. The fact that it implements a crap protocol (with which I heartily agre b.t.w.
I'm sure you can get there in the end. In the meantime, people keep paying us to develop and service Samba, so the GPL is a wonderful business plan for us (as it is for RedHat also).
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
Yes I was being rude, please accept my apology. That comment was uncalled for and I regret it.
:-) :-).
I don't think I was misrepresenting you though. You believe that the GPL destroys legitimate business. HP, IBM, SGI, Sun, Veritas and *hundreds* of other companies don't. Where there are that many MBA's telling you you're wrong, don't you question what you're saying ?
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
Samba *is* a business success, as there are many companies successfully depending on it to not only ship business product based upon it, but also many businesses using it internally for their own purposes. Just because there's no "SambaCorp (tm:-)" doesn't mean it's not a business success.
:-). We even run a "consultants" site off samba.org that advertises consultants and companies who will support Samba for a fee. This is exactly what the FreeBSD site does b.t.w..... :-). That's why the GPL is programmer and business friendly (IMHO). Most of the people advertising on that site work with us and provide a worldwide support service that *depends* on financial compensation. All for GPL code you claim is a "business destroyer".
:-) :-). At least their servers can run on Linux or FreeBSD :-).
Programmers working on Samba can leverage this knowledge into high consulting rates and employee wages (trust me on this one
I do agree with you about the insecure proprietary protocol however. But whilst people keep buying Microsoft based desktop systems, what're you gonna do.... ?
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
Both IBM and HP have donated significant pieces of code to Samba (more from HP to be honest). You can't discount the business decisions of such companies as being from "instant MBA's". I know you disagree with their decisions, however they're doing it to maximize shareholder value in the best way they see how. Many of them have chosen to help GPL projects. Given this fact, you can't realistically argue the GPL is anti-business.
I don't think they're trying to leverage a fad either. I think they see the GPL as their only hope to compete with an existing monopoly. Donating code to the BSD movement does then no good, as Microsoft can co-opt it (as they and NetApp have with BSD based code already).
They're using the GPL as a business weapon.
I don't think the GPL had anything to do with the failure of Eazel or Mandrake. Management, and bad luck (bubble bursting when it did) had more to do with it than any software license.
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
Well air is definately an essential resource :-). But Samba is probably more directly related to the business products from HP, SGI, Veritas, IBM and Sun than air (both are essential however :-).
Just because we don't have a samba.com doesn't mean we're not a business success. There are (reasonable) estimates that 30% of Windows clients connect to some Samba server. People claim apache as a business success all the time, there isn't an official apache.com. There are however, many businesses based upon it. Or do you separate out the success of Apache (>60% market share, that's a business success in my eyes) from that of Samba because Apache uses a license you agree with ?
Your comment "programmers cannot make money off the code they actually generate" is incorrect. I have personally been living from the work I do on Samba for nearly five years now. I'm making money from what I do, and what I do is write GPL code.
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
Brett,
:-). Rhetoric is all well and good, but working code speaks louder....
Explain the business success of Samba please ? I can and will dog your efforts to paint the GPL as anti-business until you can explain our success and all the companies who co-operate and donate code to us.
You know, little companies like IBM, Sun, HP.....
I'm still waiting.....
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
Hey Brett, I'm still here, and I'd still like to point out that Veritas, Sun, IBM, HP, SGI and other businesses willing to face the "overwhelming" hurdle of the GPL are *still* helping us develop Samba......
:-) :-).
Got an answer to our business success yet ?
Thought not... (after all, you've only been repeating this troll for as long as I can remember, from your infoworld days).
Readers who want a laugh can look up the old infoworld forums where Brett, a "journalist" at the time, had neglected to do his research and discover that Novell had in fact shipped a GPL version of Samba several years previously before Brett was claiming that the GPL was preventing them from doing so....
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
Who makes the decision to fire all of these people? It seems like the firings would need to come from below if the CEO, CIO, CTO, COO are fired...
I must be missing something obvious about corporate chain of command.
Douglas Calvert
> Nowhere in the article does it mention why Mandrake did the shakeup.
Note: one of the weaknesses of any online community is the fact many believe themselves to be poorly connected & that everyone else either knows -- or doesn't know -- what they have heard. That is why I haven't shared the following bit of news.
At the last PLUG (==Portland Linux/UNIX Group) meeting (3 May 2001), one of the members mentioned that he had just been laid off from Mandrake, shortly after returning from a business trip to Vietnam. In effect, about 3 weeks ago Mandrake was cutting back headcount of their US division.
This latest move merely has brought to wider attention convulsions already going on in their company.
Personal note: it's going to be hard to find work as a Linux guy when so many Linux experts are already out of work.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
The troll thanks you for feeding him. He's just another reason I read at threshold 2 only.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
At work I've been able to get some of our MCSE Gates clones to switch to Linux and Gnome using Mandrake. They tried RedHat but complained about it being too difficult. I hope Mandrake can solve their problems and get some product on the shelf, and developers on the keyboards soon.
I have a couple of Linus fans at work and I've tried to convince them to use and program for Windows 2000, but everytime they throw up their hands: "This ATL is too hard! COM is too hard! MTS gives me a headache! ISAPI modules are too difficult for me to comprehend! ActiveDirectory is too complex!" Eventually, after spouting anti-MS rhetoric to whoever would listen (to justify their failures) they rebooted their Linux which they could understand easier. I suppose they just couldn't handle the hard world of Windows. I plan on trying again in a couple of years.
I'm not a big fan of PC Anywhere (nice program but man did it cause a lot of system faults [as it hooks into the video driver/GDI], not to mention that the scripting was seriously broken in several ways), though I've had fantastic success with Netmeeting : It's fast and VERY reliable. However there's virtually no reason to ever need the GUI to administer 2000 : Close to everything is accessible via remote management tools that while providing a nice GUI communicate over a small pipe commands.
I'm sorry to hear about your friend. Has he considered looking for work at IBM or TripWire? Or for that matter, RuleSpace? There's plenty of Linux jobs out there in the Portland OR economy...just not a hell of a lot of Java jobs...
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
I'm just another zealot, but...
How many proprietary companies went down in the past year? How many closed-source/non-[F|f]ree companies slashed their staff, killed off the management team, and "refocused"?
Does it even enter the realm of remote possiblity that perhaps many of these companies weren't focusing on a business model that generates income?
Yes, Mandrake can be had for free. I tend to buy the boxed set - because waiting to download a few ISOs is a pain in the ass, and because it is indeed the point of this whole thing.
It is probably more that they don't offer much of anything else beyond a nice distro: and that's where they're screwed. It has nothing to do with the GPL.
RH has certification, consultants, and a varied business (with Cygnus, etc). They've got partnerships. They've got industry recognition. If you were to ask Ballmer which Linux company they fear (or are concerned with), I'd bet dollars to donuts his answer would be Red Hat.
Mandrake made a great product - I'm using Mandrake 7.2 right now, and intend to buy 8 RSN - but they didn't have the varied model RH has. They aren't getting preinstalled on Dell or IBM. They aren't the 'gold standard' of compatibility.
I'll be sad to see them go, if they do. OTOH, I can always use Debian, Red Hat, or Slackware.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I have friends who worked for Mandrake up til the middle part of last month. They told me all about this when they got laid off. Apparently Mandrake is getting rid of their entire North American staff, including their support staff.
There is talk of Mandrake hiring a lot of their support staff back on a contract basis, to provide tech support here in the NA.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Then jump on the expert mailing list and ask your* **
questions there.
*****************************************
>To me this is crazy, users have been asking for subscription baised distributions for a long time. If Mandrake would just put out a magazine that included periodic updates they'd have a userbase they could count and direct market other products.
This is a damn good idea. A mandrake linux magazine! I'd definately buy that. They could have 2 sections, the newbie and the expert sections where they cover general use (newbie) and software details (programming, server software, etc. expert). Hmm, maybe a subscription based online magazine would do it (but I'd prefer to have it in print if possible). Something else that they could do with the subscription is make available the periodic updates.
********************************************
For those of you who use Mandrake or even those who don't, if you want to see them continue to create a great distribution (as well as contribute to many other free software projects), either buy the distribution or contribute directly to them at Mandrake donations
Download a copy, try it, and if it is worth it, support the people that made it happen. Code, money, whatever. Communities are a two-way street and if we don't support developers how can they support us?
After having heard the refrain over and over that Linux is great for the end user because it's free as in beer, I think it would be a pretty shitty thing for its advocates to start trying to lay a guilt trip on people who chose it for that very reason.
I'd hope that won't eventually become a future Info World review dot-point. Good: Free for the cost of download. Bad: Communities are a two way street, so you owe the developers (you lazy ass!).
Cheers,
Why does it seem more and more that Linux advocates see IBM as some savior on a par with Linus himself?
Cheers,
"But you told me to switch from Windows because I would save money because Linux is free of charge. Now that I've switched, I'm supposed to feel guilty that I took you up on your offer?" Sorry, but if it's time for anyone to put their money with their mouths are, it's not the people you brought in with all the free talk.
Cheers,
I'm talking about the "sales pitch" given to current Windows end users, not to Windows developers. I think it's pretty a rare occurence when the GPL is used as an argument in these cases rather than the free beer aspect. Do you disagree?
Cheers,
That is a powerful force, but there's still an even bigger one: preloads. PC comes with Windows, user uses Windows.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It's Free Software. You can't be stranded. That's one of the major features. (Compare that situation to what you do if the maker of Windows, MacOS, BeOS, AmigaOS, OS/2, etc goes out of business or drops the product or whatever. Now that is what it's like to be stranded.)
Worst case: you end up having to use the final Mandrake, or maintain/update it yourself by cruising Freshmeat every few weeks.
Better case: some other distro maintainer decides that they like the last Mandrake so much, that they take it over. There are no barriers to this sort of thing happening, other than work.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You've got things backwards. No serious commercial development != stranded. The GPL is what prevents the stranding from taking place.
I use AmigaOS at home and OS/2 at work. So believe me, I know all about what it's like to experience a lack of "serious commercial development." And since those platforms are closed, "serious commercial development" is the only development that can ever take place. If the IP owner decides that it's not worth it, then it just doesn't happen. GPLed code is never hostage to that type of reality, and always has potential for development, whether that happens to be "serious commercial" or otherwise.
So please, don't tell an Amiga/OS2 guy like me that GPL results in stranding. I wish that my favorite software received -- or even could receive -- even a fraction of the maintenance and development that Free Software gets.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Every distributor that has dependencies has the same problem. The basic problem is just that packagers are lazy. They don't take the time to see that the package actually runs just fine on perl4 and thus there is no reason to make it dependent on the absolute most recent perl5 package. "Dependency" has become a huge misnomer.
Our office uses a Novell network. Linux connects well to Novell as a server, but as a client!!! Ugh! I haven't even been able to see the servers. This despite having supervisory access to Novell, so I can see all of the names. And the descriptions of what I am supposed to fill into the blanks don't use the same terms as the Novell manuals use, so I don't even know which I'm supposed to try.
So I try blind fumbling through all the possible choices of names, taken three at a time, mixing in TCP/IP numbers just in case. And I still haven't been able to log on to a server or print to a printer. This has been true for several different distributions. Mars/NWE didn't help. Caldera didn't help (though that disk may have been bad). Red Hat didn't help. (FWIW, I've been through 4 distros in several versions, Debina, Red Hat, Caldera and Mandrake. These were largely distros that were purchased as boxed sets, though not Debian, of couse, and frequently I got the upgrades as CheapBytes disks.)
When the external disk that I was running Linux off of died, I didn't replace it. (I didn't try Red Hat 7.1, as the disk had died by then, but I recently had a chance to ask some Red Hat techs, and was told that the workstation logon probably wouldn't work, though Caldera had some drivers... [see list in prior paragraph]). I use Linux exclusively at home, but at work I need to use the LAN.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Have you heard of package signatures? Though it's true, not all packages have them. Still, Red Hat, at least, signs all of it's packages. (Well, at least the release version... I've encountered a few beta packages that were unsigned, and thought long and hard over whether or not to install them. Usually I waited for the next version.)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
StarOffice/OpenOffice.org seem to open all of those formats pretty well. It's not 100%, it can't be, but much of the formatting and even the VBA scripts will transfer in, far better than it does in AbiWord or Kword.
:)
And OpenOffice.org is open source, so no guilt required. Plus they got rid of that annoying desktop thing.
My journal has hot
I have never bough a PC that came preloaded with Windows.
:)
Of course, that could have something to do with the fact that I build all my own boxes...
My journal has hot
Check the slackware-current changelog. It's BETA time!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
> Several of the slashdot staff are big Mandrake fans; I hope they can keep going in the face of adversity.
Hopefully you didn't mean that the way it sounds.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
These are the same Desktop developers that insist on using butt-ugly GTK Mandrake configuration tools with my sweet KDE environment.
No they aren't; I did some contracting work for MandrakeSoft, and I was asked to use GTK for the interface, because that's what everything else used. I would've preferred Qt, but hey, what can you do? I got the impression that these types of decisions aren't made at the developer level, they're made a bit higher up.
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but it is a simply matter of a simple budget.
When executives are let go in groups, it is very, very rarely an issue of budget cuts.
For example, when you hear companies taking hits, and they need to drop staff, who do they drop first? The visionaries? The guys at the top? Why would they can themselves? If they knew of severe budget problems, they'd stand up in front of the press, talk about it, and either quit or find other jobs to get into. People who know about really tough budgets usually find a graceful way out, or else they start canning the low-level staff.
On the other hand, when there's personal disputes, the low-level staff keep their jobs. For example, if there was a battle between the Yanks and the French, with major disagreements, that's when you see the kind of executive bloodbath that Roblimo talks about in the article. You see people get sacked en masse without a chance to talk to the press first, or to spin it their way. Executives never get sacked en masse as a result of budget problems, because they're the ones making the budget. The only way that happens is if you have dissatisfied funders or shareholders - which of course, could still be the case here.
What's your damage, Heather?
At work I've been able to get some of our MCSE Gates clones to switch to Linux and Gnome using Mandrake.
I rarely make book recommendations, but when you said that, you caught my eye. I'm an MCSE in the process of switching over to Mandrake, and I've got the perfect tool for your conversions: "Linux for Windows NT/2000 Administrators, The Secret Decoder Ring" by Mark Minasi with Dan York and Craig Hunt. It's put out by Sybex, and you can find it at your local big bookstores on the shelves. The book is outstanding. I tried to make the leap several times, but I couldn't do it until I got this book.
It explains everything in terms Windows admins can understand, and it's even honest about the advantages of both platforms. It's the first book I've seen that really makes the transformation easy.
What's your damage, Heather?
Well hopefully...
I think they'd be better off continuing to put out release candidates until they get one that - as is - they're happy enough to put out as the retail release (and final ISO download if they want to continue doing that).
I tried the "release" 8.0 download, and among other issues found that:
- the 2.4.3 kernel they install by default (it also comes with a 2.2 kernel) suffers from the VM failures that were still unfixed as of recent 2.4.4-ac versions. Symptom - under heavy swap conditions, the kernel will just kill processes (in my case parts of KDE) in a temporary hack attempt to keep going.
- the aic7xxx (Adaptec SCSI controll driver) they ship with is broken to the extend that you may or may not be able to install off a SCSI CD (at best it will take 3hr+ due to SCSI timeouts and retries). This is a known reported issue. I got around it by copying the CD to disk and doing a disk based install, then installing a newer kernel.
Unfortunately Mandrake's way of doing things is that they release the last release candidate plus bug fixes, so it's anbody's guess whether the retail version fixes any of the 8.0 "release" download issues.
It'd not just the free FTP access, it's the cheapbytes sales too, from which Mandrake get nothing.
You never see people complaining about not being able to download SuSE ISO's, or about SuSE being $29.95 (official version) rather than Mandrake's $3.49 at cheapbytes.
Linux many be free software, and none of us need a distribution, but we all recognise the value of them and use them. It's a pretty odd business model for Mandrake to create a product that people clearly want and then give it away! Sure if they stop providing free downloads or allowing ISO distribution people will whine, but as long as they provide a product we want and do so at a reasonable price (they do - it's 29.95 same as SuSE), then we'll buy it.
Well I usually hear about free as in freedom especially from the GPL fans (which most linux fans are).
Either way paying $50.00 for a box at staples is far cry from paying $50.00 per user to MS.
War is necrophilia.
Damn.
I love Mandrake. Redhat is nice, but do a search on
rpmfind.net and see what comes up most. Mandrake
has more recent builds on almost all packages than
Redhat ever has. Nicer bootup system, more recent
kernel builds, better desktop configuration tools, it
would be a shame to lose it! Especially since the 8.0
release was so highly acclaimed!
::sob::
Say it ain't so, Mandrake! Say it ain't so!
--
Shaun Thomas: INN Programmer
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
BSDI is not BSD company in the sense that Red Hat is a GPL company. It is a BSD company in the sense that Red Hat is a Linux company. Clearly, since the original troll^H^H^H^H^Hpost was about the GPL, you should be looking at companies that release software under the BSD licensem like Crynwr (I know it's not public, it's just an example).
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
You confuse manufacturing and service industries.
Kinda like science? Where the idea is to publish for peer review? Or has Computer *Science* become just Information Systems?
"solutions" is a service
Why cant you understand this? You're a geek. Obviously you're just gunna go download it. You are not the target audience. Mandrake has specifically set up their distribution for end users who probably dont even have a decent internet connection (yes, please do remember that minimum download of Mandrake is 1 gig).
How we know is more important than what we know.
Ummm, who said they are going bankrupt/biting the dust? Sounds like a drastic restructuring so they can go back to french-only at "le lunch"....
Dunno dude. I would think a super serious fellow like yourself would never dye your hair white, or get in a goofy cowboy outfit, but the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. So I have to ask, re your antagonism to penguins in an install, what's up with that?
There's no need for newbies to even touch rpms in Mandrake 8. They've got a nice little GUI tool, which is, IMNSHO, much better than Windows Update.
For the standard Mandrake 8 distro, its $5 a cd, plus $10 shipping. I assume they are selling the single disk for $15, and the 2 disk set for $20.
The "PowerPack" is $69 + $20 shipping for 7 cds. You can see what's in that here.
You won't have to relearn things to switch from RedHat to Mandrake. The only real difference is that Mandrakes GUI tools are a lot better than RedHats.
Mandrake will never, ever, make it as a server distro. RedHat has taken the middle road, trying to be both a good desktop, and server distro. Mandrake is a desktop distro, period. Guess what, they do it a lot better than everyone else. I'd recommend it to my father, if he didn't have to have the MS office tools (he's a freelance columnist). I'm expecting to be able to recommend Mandrake 9 to my mother.
Yeah, the VCs really wanted to pull out because of your use of the GPL. I'm sure it had absolutly nothing to with your being a dotcom. VCs are herd animals, they won't stray very far from the pack, and the pack is scared of dotcoms right now.
Whatever gave you the impression they were being truthful?
When executives are let go in groups, it is very, very rarely an issue of budget cuts.
Well, this depends how much they are paid... There was a rumor that they were paid a LOOOOOOOOOOOT... Not sure how it went exactly but the following scenario makes sense:
Not even a nicely GUI-filled, easy to use distribution as Mandrake made a difference to people who love the ease of MS based products. I've never used Mandrake, but have seen co-workers use it, and claim it to be the easiest to use of all the Linux distributions.
If this is the case, then why haven't many MS users switched over to something so easy. Is it the way some of these companies market themselves, which is close to zero when it comes to mainstream magazines, or is it that too many distributions add to the confusion or something.
So far so good for Redhat however who is managing to keep in the game, and for all the Linux users, just hope this is the last distribution to go under, else your going to have some massive "Linux is dying" trolls. Not to mention (which is most important) a sad showing of the possible overall outcome for Linux, should they not hurry and capture a large portion of the home pc segment.
Want Root?
I've tried a few distros over the years, and recently downloaded Mandrake 8.0 in a desperate attempt to get my PCMCIA Network card working on my stuborn laptop.
Everything worked fine without *any* tweaks. Yes, everything worked - even sound and my USB floppy drive which I had pretty much given up on. So Mandrake certainly gets my vote.
Even though I downloaded the distro - I will certainly be going out to buy the boxed copy to show my support.
Actually, Mandrake's ease of distribution does make a difference. I'd given up on learning Linux several times in the past mainly because of installation and documentation frustrations. Mandrake was the first distro that made these issues managable for me. I doubt that I will give up my easy MS products any time soon, but I will certainly reinstall them many times.
I'm getting previous Windows only people to try out Linux because of Mandrake. The enhancements Mandrake has made that put their distribution well ahead of the others in terms of usability.
... then stops because its pointless*
The control panel, for example, is a godsend to users who have no clue about where to begin to look. Mandrake shows that Linux can be an OS for the masses.
*grumbles about the stock market in general
Hold on Mandrake, you've got the right idea... stick it out and you'll do splendidly.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Thought 1: when the seniors are cut and the line employees kept, it's usually due to a shareholder/board decision, for serious business-plan shifts or no-confidence votes. Conversely, when the line employees are cut, it's a decision within the company to reduce complexity but keep the same basic direction.
Thought 2: as a Linux newbie, I tried fresh Mandrake 8.0 iso's first. Tried to get it to work for a Toshiba 1715XCDS crappy laptop. The installer seemed to work okay, but once the installer quit, the actual system was flaky, especially the way Toshiba's lcd/crt switch worked. That, combined with the sugary cute penguin mascot junk EVERYWHERE, I decided to back-step to Red Hat 7.1 which worked much more reliably (though still a couple gotchas). Mandrake was much too cutesy and maybe too bleeding-edge untested.
Thought 3: another poster made this observation but I thought I'd amplify it. I downloaded ISOs because I wanted more recent versions than were available at Wal*Mart and Best Buy. I would have paid the money either way, to support the companies involved. I'd support modest premium fees for not-yet-boxed ISO images from a fastish FTP site.
[
I for one appreciated your contribution to Mandrake through KDE, and remembered that you'd been very helpful in forwarding a conversion list of RH to Debian to me once.
My point is that people tend to recall those things about former colleagues they liked -- why not approach MDK? If they are refocusing as you say, don't you think they'd be open to the possibility? Especially if their viewpoints are sympatico with yours.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
I am not sure how they are structured and how many employees they are using but it is a simply matter of a simple budget. If they sell 100,000.00 of Mandrake a month, and their expenses are 110,000.00, they need to cut back, restructure and not be so wasteful. Sometimes companies try to do to much to fast and forget to look at the bottom line about how to pay the bills.
"With enough memory and hard drive space, anything in life is possible!"
http://www.planettribes.com/allyourbase/AYB2.swf
http://hubert.retrogames.com/article.php?sid=1
--
Tarald - The Lord of Smeg
Tarald - The Lord of Smeg
You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on
Must as we get "flat rate" cable or DSL here in North America... it still cost you money for bandwidth with leased lines. I do not mind paying a few dollars for the right to download at all. If it wasn't for loki and their delicious tribes 2 I would even buy a copy of mandrake and a copy of redhat. But as i want ot get the game i sort of need to buget... SO prehaps that can be the next step micro payments for ftp use. I don't mind..
(I work for Red Hat as a developer)
Why don't you use debian or some other free distribution then? You can't have a free market if people can't charge others what they need to survive.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
You write:
Absolutely the opposite is true. BSD-licensed code is the most open kind of open source, and next to the public domain the freest kind of free software.You write:
Absolutely true. Which means that it is truly free. It can be used for any purpose without strings attached. Or a penalty. Or a "poison pill." This is true freedom.--Brett Glass
--Brett Glass
--Brett Glass
--Brett Glass
Jeremy, not only are you being rude but you're misrepresenting what I said. The GPL does not prevent anyone from shipping code. However, its stated purpose is to ensure that no programmer can be justly rewarded for his or her work. It also destroys legitimate businesses. The fact that HP and others are contributing code to Samba simply means that, like many businesses, they do not always recognize that their conduct is self-destructive. In time, I believe that it will be recognized that the GPL destroyed Mandrake and Eazel... and will likely soon destroy many other businesses as well. Stallman will be laughing.
--Brett Glass
Actually, if many MBAs were saying that (although I see no indication that MBAs are the ones making the decisions here; they seem to be driven by marketroids who do not understand business fundamentals), then I'd be even more confident that I was correct. It is possible to get an MBA without any practical business experience whatsoever, and the "instant" MBAs which are being churned out by our nation's night schools and community colleges are too often subject to fads. Hence the recent stock market bubble and implosion.
The GPL does destroy legitimate businesses. Mandrake and Eazel are two good examples. HP, IBM, et al are trying to leverage a fad; however, if they're smart, they will give lip service but not allow the GPL to jeopardize their markets or their intellectual property.
--Brett Glass
Let me tell you a classic story. One day, the two ethnic brothers decided to go into business selling watermelons. They got a truck, bought a truckload of watermelons at a dollar apiece, and then sold them in the marketplace at a dollar apiece. Their product sold like hotcakes; in fact, the brothers had cornered the market. After several loads of watermelons, they discovered that -- because of the expense of fuel for the truck -- they had not only failed to make money but had less than before.
"I told you, you idiot," said one ethnic brother to the other. "What we need is a larger truck."
--Brett Glass
--Brett Glass
Ciao
----
FB
I'm always impressed with your ability to flame someone [who deserves it] back into the stone age and yet still come across as a really nice guy...great job Jeremy ;)
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Whaddaya mean??? This is standard operating procedure for many an ailing tech company! Fire the techs and keep the usless marketing drones and stock promoters!
You're using her as bait, Master!
The person who moderated this as a troll needs to be taken out back and put out of our misery.
Mandrake's a great distro. A friend of mine has a copy and his business doesn't use Linux at all. He keeps it around because it's the best way to reformat hard disks on Winblows systems without destroying the data.
- ------
My work, on the other hand, standardized on Mandrake long ago.
-------------------------------------------
Maybe I should clarify. I bought mandrake at best buy, even though I have never used that specific copy. I meant that making it only available through paying for it seems unfair to me. I have no gripes with paying for a packaged box with manuals and support etc. And whoever modded me as flamebait, pretty lame.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I guess it also depends on how much they are charging. $40 for a download is steep, $15 should cover bandwidth, servers, and leave room for profit and would work just fine.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Money and distribution is important, but its also not fair to be charging for other people's work, and essentially making them pay for it. No one would help on any of their projects if they did that, and it would be essentially like stepping back to a closed source model.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
for another couple of years. Mandrake 8.0 is a wonderful product that has a good chance of getting a toe-hold on the desktops of Microsoft/America. But all of the whinging about the failure of GPL is really getting a little too much. The problem is that the product isn't really ready for the herd yet (not the hurd). There isn't a fully operational office suite with all of the bells and whistles necessary for everyday use. I do everything in Mandrake, but I come back to Windows for serious writing. Also, Gnome 2.0 later this year should help the situation. Maybe a little bit of austerity and if Mandrake can ride out this storm they should be poised for some serious microsoft-fscking. You can buy this thing anywhere!
Well, it's good to see the high-priced Americans go. But it kind of sucks that they kept the Desktop developers. These are the same Desktop developers that insist on using butt-ugly GTK Mandrake configuration tools with my sweet KDE environment.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Sheesh, seems like my joke was a bit too much for the slow-witted slashdot community. The satire in the above post was to point out exactly why Debian is superior. Its not a for profit company. Debian has no CEOs, CIOs, or CTOs. The Debian developers have been doing everything voluntarily from day one.
Maybe these recent events will show people that Debian is the Linux distro that adheres the closest to the free software movement.
On the contrary, I can't see how you can make money "selling support". What is this "support" thing really, anyway? At my workplace, we've never paid for support, for any product, apart from the case of products where online technical support is included in the initial cost. Unless it's in the form of training, or something like that. Microsoft have shown us how crappy technical support can be - pay by the minute to listen to a guy read from the same help file that YOU are currently staring at. Support is only worth paying for if it's really HELPFUL - ie.
Q: I've got a problem
A: Do this, this, this and this.
Q: Great, that worked!
A: Cool, pay me.
This rarely happens. Not in windows. Not in Linux. More often than not, you get better answers from free, public forums. On top of that, what stops third-parties selling support? I understand the focus is corporate support, not support for home users, but still, it is rarely worth it.
The simple fact is, people are going to have to start paying for Linux. It's not fair, but if it doesn't happen sooner or later, a lot of great stuff like Mandrake (my distro of choice, it rocks too damn hard) might go under. There are lots of ways to do this - create cheaper "light" versions. Make it free for "non-commerical use". Making money off "support" is destined to go the same was as making money off banner ads did.
-"I still believe in revolution; I just don't capitalize it anymore." - srini!
the notion that it hurts the programmers is just moronic.
you just don't get it.
No, but if he joined the GPL collective then he would get it. I'm to polite to say exactly *where* he would get it.
GPL has to be the worst deal in IP *ever*. At least musicians signed by labels get *something*, and if they can manage to put out a decent 2nd album they usually get quite wealthy. Book authors--same deal. Write one best seller and maybe your royalties may not be so hot, but after that the advances are sweeeeet. The best deal any GPL programmer gets is a job with some company that might lay him off in 6 months.
Sure, you say, the GPL programmer can sell his work proprietary if he wants; but the instant he does that he loses the entire community of support and respect that gave him what little marketability he had in the first place.
To date, authors under non-copyleft licenses (of which the BSD is just one example) don't do much better but if they like they can fork and/or merge with proprietaries and still remain respected members of the community. Also, they don't have to worship at the altar of the FSF and its "ideals".
The GPL ensures that bright ideas don't die in some company's software vault.
No, they die in the middle of the street. Death is death no matter how you slice it.
The real problem here isn't the GPL specificly. It's copyleft. The only way I see to end this jihad is to go with what I like to call copyforward. That's where the source can be used by both Open Source and closed source programs, everybody knows that, and nobody is allowed to tell you otherwise. No more stuff like readline and getopt being kidnapped by copylefters so that they can trick people into thinking that the GPL is unavoidable when writing *NIX software. <RANT>Got MSVC? Just go to your help and search for getopt. Well, whaddya know! There's a getopt that's as free as BSD, but you'd never know it when some newbie asks how to parse the command-line and the GNU people point him to GNU stuff and nobody else says anything. There's a lot of stuff like this.</RANT>
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
OK, let's flesh out your metaphor a little more. The US Constitution established rights for citizens, true, but it also established a government and made provisions designed to ensure that the government would be likely go continue.
If the Constitution had been written like the GPL, it would have had the Bill of Rights, but no provision for raising taxes. We may not think of paying taxes as a privelege, but if all our soldiers had been sent home for lack of funds and the Soviets had invaded we would have quickly realized what a privelege it was.
In short, a balance between business and consumer is required. By attempting to shift that balance too far towards the consumer, the GPL limits itself. "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn" (Deuteronomy 25:4) but that is exactly what copyleft does.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Yes Dan, but what % of those persons BOUGHT mandrake boxed, and how many downloaded it? RedHat seems to generate most of their income with support contracts, or so I read somewhere.
>:)
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
Oddly, the founder of a wildly successful free company doesn't agree. "I saw [in the GNU Manifesto] a business plan in disguise." Michael Tiemann, Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur's Account.
Why tools and solutions companies like Cygnus (and Ars Digita, and Ada Core Technologies, and CodeSourcery) have had more success with free software than retail and support companies is an interesting question. Perhaps you should look into it instead of making wild and inflammatory claims.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Slackware is being cut loose from there parent company even though Slackware does something unheard of in the distro game, they make money.
So we have unprofitable easy to use distros like Mandrake cutting back and we have profitable difficult ones like Slackware being cast adrift.
Will some one wake me when this starts to make sense?
Discloser: I have slack on one box and mandrake on the other because faux-wife should not be made to use slack and i should not have to use mandrake.
Ascii artist &
Mandrake is such a high quality OS
Its a distribution, or some kind of Deep Purple song or maybe something to do with dragon kin, but not an OS
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
Why do you think Mandrake's problems have anything to do with the GPL?
I use Slackware now, and hope that they don't close down, because Salck and Debian
Slackware and Debian are not "companies" with CEO's that try to sell their distro at Walmart ... etc. Quite the opposite in fact. They're "old school". So I wouldn't worry about it. It ain't gonna happen.
*yes I know he meant the Mandrake team, but I wasn't able to resist.
---
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
I have to agree.. I've loved Mandrake's ease of use since I've been stuck with some form of broken windows since Dos 2.11. The 8.0 distrobution is the best I've used yet on my P2 400 system. Wish Dell warrenties wern't so flakey about OS changes or I'd use it on my new laptop. :P
~~Behold the flying Cow with a railgun!~~
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
hmm, I seem to remember an identical posting a couple of months ago. You are the laziest troll I've ever come across if you have to copy and paste your contributions.
I think the one thing that RPM is missing is that packages can only recommend other packages and not just refuse to install without them. Maybe there could be different levels of recommendation:
I don't agree with this at all. Mandrake is having problems because their business model is wrong. You can't make money by selling boxed sets. I have had long chats with senior execs from SuSE and RedHat and they all say this. For both of these companies, the way of the future is to sell support to corporates. Both SuSE and RedHat have agreements with IBM to support Linux running on their eServer range.
SuSE have their Alpha distro, for exactly this reason - you're not going to make any money selling it are you? There are not enough users running Alpha workstations. But you can sell support.
You can't beat MS on the desktop. No way, no how. Linux distributors must play on Linux's strengths which is increasingly in the enterprise server market. Once that market is won, then maybe, they can turn their sights to the desktop.
Over the past few years I've used numerous Linux distributions. Each time I've only bothered to download the CDs online (actually, before I had a fast connection, I had others do it for me). However, I have recently been considering donating to two of my favorite distributions - Mandrake and Red Hat.
Unfortunately, like many people, I'm mostly broke. When I do feel charitable, I donate elsewhere than a for-profit software company. I considered buying a boxed set of one of these distributions, but I figured that it wouldn't exactly be the best donation. I already have the OS, I don't need the manuals. Why should I bother to buy what costs these companies a fair amount to manufacture?
Then I found this page at Mandrake's web page. Below the spot where you purchase the latest "Powerpack" version for $70, you can purchase the two-CD set for $10 plus $10 shipping. These CDs are cheap to manufacture and cheap to ship, so I'm sure Mandrake makes a bundle of a profit margin on this $20 purchase. This seems like an affordable way to give back to a company that really seems to try to give Linux users a desktop that works well and looks nice, with all the very latest features. If I didn't just exhaust my checking account yesterday I would probably have purchased this today (even though I downloaded and burnt the CDs awhile back), but I hope to in the near future (next check).
So, here's the hypocrite in me to ask supporters of Mandrake to save the mirrors and order this two-CD set, maybe when 8.1 comes out or something. I didn't even know it was available until today, but I'm happy I found it.
Free software does not mean we shouldn't support it with both our time and our money. Let's give back in monetary form to the companies whose products we take for granted.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
The president, CIO, and "other executives" have been fired "as a group." CTO Jean-Loup Gailly is out. All the IS team except one is bye-bye. Some engineers and other "random troops" have either been laid off, taken "voluntary" pay cuts, or have gone from full-time to part-time status. But the team responsible for developing Mandrake for the desktop, contrary to the rumors, is supposedly going to remain (mostly) intact for the moment. As one Mandrake insider put it, the desktop developers "are still the people who make the product Macmillan [Mandrake's shrink-wrap product distributor] sells that generates income."
"it's not exactly slack or debian"
What is that supposed to mean? Are you implying that mandrake is somehow less useful because it's easier to install?
Oh wait, I get it, if mandrake doesn't install package A out of the can and debian does, then debian is obviously superior nevermind the fact you could download the source/rpm/tarball in less than 10 seconds and install it on ANY distro.
As far as slack goes, you've never used it but you heard all the configuration is done by hand and you have to *gasp* compile your own programs. Well gee if that's the case then it MUST be superior to mandrake because we all know there is a correlation between difficulty of use and overall system power.
Apologetic "supporters" do nothing for the cause, go take your inferiority complex elsewhere.
- Toby
The point is, they aren't charging for the work of others. The GPL defines it as charging for the distribution of the work. It is no different than Fed-Ex charging me $14 to overnight a report I write. My work, their distribution. When we release code under the GPL, these are the rules we sign up for.
Sadly, Mandrake did what many Free Software companies have done (free distribution), and it contributed to problems. The thing is, Free Software allows for making money off the venture, but in specific ways: distribution and service. Mandrake was making strides in distribution (I even saw a copy of Mandrake 7.2 in Wal-Mart) but it always seemed easier to just download a copy.
An interesting point - the GPL does not require providing FTP access to the distribution free of charge, particularly before a boxed version of the product is available. I was no huge fan of what Libranet did by charging for the download, but in a moment of rare clarity I realized if the choice is to have a fee based download or boxed purchase versus losing a distribution, I would gladly pay. I have purchased 2 versions of RedHat (5.2 and 7.1) solely because I believe in supporting companies that have empowered me. not everyone can create a Debian - it is a special group of people that make things like Debian happen.
I don't think I am alone when I say I don't mind paying for Free Software. As oxymoronic as that sounds, developers need to eat. Companies need to make money. Hopefully Mandrake will rebound and solve their issues. In the interim - for those of us with the means - we should consider buying a single copy of our favorite distro, or donate to Free Software projects we value. Download a copy, try it, and if it is worth it, support the people that made it happen. Code, money, whatever. Communities are a two-way street and if we don't support developers how can they support us?
Ive never bought a RedHat box, so I dunno about that, but the Mandrake powerpack is definetely a good value.
Besides, it will be better for a newbie to have the full 4 cds (7 including sources) plus manuals (not to mention a serial number for installation support), than an envelope with 2 naked cds and no support at all.
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C'mon, flame me!
No sig for the moment.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Shouldn't that be "... base ..." If you're gonna do it, do it right!
Where is grammar_nazi when we need him most?
The correct badly translated Japanese is: "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!"
Humorless sig goes here.
Mandrake have developed such a fine product. It is the easiest distribution around. So please guys instead of downloading the software, why don't you go ahead and buy it?
Maybe they should implement a pay per download system. Something like $1 for every distribution downloaded. How else would you expect to gain money by giving stuff away for free?
LinuxGram has released the retail market shares for the USA during the first 2001 Quarter (Source: LinuxGram Newsletter/PC Data). Guess who is first? Mandrake - 33.8%
Redhat - 30.7%
Suse - 23.8%
FreeBSD - 5.6%
Caldera - 2.5%
Corel - 2.3%
Turbolinux - 1.2%
With 33.8% US Market share, how can they be loosing money?
"just connect this to..."
BZZT.
Liberty.
Mandrake can market the hell out of a pretty good product, but without support services or a solid revinue model it will fail. I believe Mandrake is losing money because of the lack of support revunue.
An example is Caldera. Caldera owns %2 of the linux market but has huge profits that may even be greater then redhat. The money mainly comes from professional services, consulting and having guys from Caldera come to your company to fix something or give a recommendation. Personal one to one service and sales.
I am aware mandrake lacks this, but you can't cut support! Especially this early in the game. It took years for Sco and Sun to esculate their services to their current level but they beat off Ultrix, Irix, AT&T in the process by doing so.
Its all about charging for support and providing software for free as in speech but not beer. The installer in mandrake is close to this but there is alot of competition from yast2 and Anaconda.
They need to increase their support, cut marketing, and try to develop some unique application and over time it will gain profits and mindshare. Remember alot of phb and CIO's get their mindshare for a product based on company performance and not on product quality. This is why NT took off by storm and why sco is still around. The phb's only looked at how much money ms was worth and based their server solutions mostly on that. Most of them blindly confused product quality with corporate revenue. Also they want to make sure the company does not go under for obvious reasons.
http://saveie6.com/
Nowhere in the article does it mention why Mandrake did the shakeup.
I assume it was obvisouly for finicial reasons. I am quie supprised. Mandrake is a very popular distro. I admit they do not have much support services but it seems to be more aimed at the linux newbie market then server market due to its bleeding edgeness. I wonder how much profit a professional distro like Caldera or Redhat make on services for bussinesses vs profits on the sale.
I noticed SuSE is gaining alot of market share and may be close to toppling redhat in the US. The link is at there website so it may be biased.
Its also one of the most easiest install's I have ever seen. Easy installations is one of mandrakes main strengths and selling points. It also is very solid and bugfree and still has a unix flavor.
Perhaps the rise of SuSE and support profits for redhat have eaten mandrakes profit margins. I also noticed that alot of geeks who are angry at bugs in redhat and mandrake have switched to debian. Debian probably is the most solid distro non commercial distro out there. I believe its just competition thats hurting them.
http://saveie6.com/
Case in point of the "religous" modding down those who dare to say the emperor is naked - the parent post is modded down as "troll" for suggesting that perhaps the GPL might have flaws.
Perfect example of the *nix elitist high horse.
Hey, don't worry, if it gets easier, I'm sure you'll still be able to tweak it to hell. But wake up and realize that more users (even newbies!) means more useful software for the Linux platform.
If you build it, they will come. But as of now, no one wants to build it.
I sincerely hope they don't go under, who would take up the slack? They've contributed a lot in the way of GUI setup and configuration tools.
Your Damn right...I've got Mastering Windows NT Server 5th Edition on my desk right now....and it was every bit worth the $70 my employer paid for it. He is a very interesting & easy to read author....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
As explained by MandrakeSoft founder Gael Duval (in French here) my personal case is different: "Jean-loup Gailly left approximately two months ago precisely because he was in disagreement with the American management team". You can read more details in the MandrakeSoft press release.
Jean-loup Gailly, former MandrakeSoft CTO.
Missing links, sorry: Gael's article and the press release.
Seriously, though, I get asked why I use such a user-friendly distro like Mandrake, but the fact is, it's a very high quality distro that installs most of the dev stuff I need quickly and easily. I know it's not exactly Slack or Debian, but it gets the job done, and I don't mind not setting up every little source package myself. I hope Mandrake finds a way to restructure, so they can continue their fine work.
It's good news... Really I know Mandrake very well and they just come back to a more sane environment where you have to make money before spending it ;-) Trust me: Mandrakesoft is in good health and there are no plans to shutdown the company. They have hit #1 retail sales in the USA during 1st quarter 2001.
news that he was being let go effective immediately. When asked about it he said "It was difficult for them to keep me on posing for pictures and drawings, because it just looks like that I sit around all the time."
"Perhaps things would be better if there was a more viable business model or something" he continued, "but I hope to continue on in a voluntary role."
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Excellent troll. I look forward to the responses.
Nobody has done it before, therefore it can't be done...been there, heard that, got the T-shirt...snore...zzz...next
I thought it was: "All your vote are belong to us." -- Bush/Cheney
U.S. Democracy: born 7/4/1776, died 12/12/2000 R.I.P.
first off, the software is great, very little to complain about. Mandrake has done a nice job of providing forums and such as well as making it easy to work on developing via the 'cooker' version.
MANDRAKE EXPERT, that's what's wrong. when you have an issue, you go to some 'expert' forum and they are pay schemes to get people to answer questions. this shifted focus away from some other community areas and created a 'FORK' in the community. now you don't just go to mandrake forum to discuss the OS and ask questions, those posts go to mandrakeexpert.com and to 'be an expert' is to register and ask to get questions sent your way.
let's just help each other, and be a community like we always have and scrap this mandrake expert concept, in Linux, we're all experts, that's what makes this a special place to be, there are no end users in an open world, and no-one should be thought of as an end user vs an expert.
that's just my twisted view on things, no-body will listen anyhow.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
just a thought
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Your sig should read "All your music are belong to us", not "All your music are belongs to us", because the original phrase that your sig was generated from was "All your bases are belong to us"
Oh, yeah, good point... I got confused with the overusage of "s" in that sig.
You're half right. Everybody knows that the GPL makes Linux a pretty tough sell for most business, but the notion that it hurts the programmers is just moronic.
For all intents and purposes, the BSD license is no better than closed source. There is nothing about the BSD license to keep a company from improving on BSD code and not releasing their source. Fuck - if it weren't for the government intervening with AT&T, BSD wouldn't even exist today!
I see a few other voices on Slashdot pointing out that the Emperor (Penguin?) has no clothes.
The Emperor isn't naked - you just don't get it. Most Linux advocates aren't about burying Microsoft and Friends, they're about having an OS that does exactly what they want. The goal has never been to be the biggest commercial distribution - the goal is to be the best. The GPL ensures that bright ideas don't die in some company's software vault.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot readers stated that there are 7000 nearly identical posts of your anti-BSD spam. How many people actually believe it? Let's see. The number of intelligent Slashdot posts versus your anti-BSD spam is roughly in ratio of 500 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000*500 = 3,500,000 Slashdot users who are annoyed by your idiotic spam. A recent article put your spam at about 80 percent on the nonsense scale. Therefore there are many thousands of Slashdot readers who know that you are full of crap. This is consistent with the number of Slashdot posts stating so.
Due to the trouble you have thinking, abysmal IQ test scores and so on, you will be lucky to go out into the business world and land a job at McDonalds.
All major surveys show that your anti-BSD spam has steadily gotten more annoying. You are very sick and your long term survival prospects are very dim -- especially if your identity becomes known. If you are to survive at all it will be among other idiots, trolls, and the mentally ill. Interest in your anti-BSD spam continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could revive it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, you are completely brain dead.
Signatures just prove that a package came with the distribution, not that the code was written by someone talented or intelligent.
Slashdot readers stated that there are 7000 nearly identical posts of your anti-BSD spam. How many people actually believe it? Let's see. The number of intelligent Slashdot posts versus your anti-BSD spam is roughly in ratio of 500 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000*500 = 3,500,000 Slashdot users who are annoyed by your idiotic spam. A recent article put your spam at about 80 percent on the nonsense scale. Therefore there are many thousands of Slashdot readers who know that you are full of crap. This is consistent with the number of Slashdot posts stating so.
Due to the trouble you have thinking, abysmal IQ test scores and so on, you will be lucky to go out into the business world and land a job at McDonalds.
All major surveys show that your anti-BSD spam has steadily gotten more annoying. You are very sick and your long term survival prospects are very dim -- especially if your identity becomes known. If you are to survive at all it will be among other idiots, trolls, and the mentally ill. Interest in your anti-BSD spam continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could revive it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, you are completely brain dead.
This is the same cut & paste troll that he (and his little friends?) post every time the name BSD appears in a posting. I have to wonder if he is some pissed-off janitor that got let go from Walnut Creek or BSDi. Why else would he be that interested in bad-mouthing an OS? I mean, either you use *BSD or you don't, but if you don't, why would you get your panties that twisted every time it is mentioned? I just hope that he gets moderated down like usual.
I'm not "anti-Linux" and, in fact, I run Mandrake 8.0. Having a humorous signature line that pokes fun at one of Linux's weak points hardly makes me "anti-Linux". Nice try.
At work I've been able to get some of our MCSE Gates clones to switch to Linux and Gnome using Mandrake. They tried RedHat but complained about it being too difficult. I hope Mandrake can solve their problems and get some product on the shelf, and developers on the keyboards soon.
I switched from RH6x to Mandrake Corporate Server last year. I find it excellent. One possible reason Mandrake are in financial trouble is that they didn't sell an english distribution of Corporate Server. Only a French one. So I had to get it from CheapBytes thus robbing Mandrake of revenue. (Yes, I know I could have downloaded it but I live in a third world country where 600Mb downloads are folly) I would gladly purchase a couple of copies of an English Corporate Server distro from Mandrake.
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
"Mandrake is an excellent distro, especially for beginners who are looking for something less scattered than RedHat. Mandrake has continued to set the standard for ease of use and functionality. I hope they stay around for the sake of the linux community."
I agree. Mandrake is by far the best distro for ease of installation and use. And at the moment, it is a better desktop OS than Red Hat, without losing compatibility with Red Hat...
The best of both worlds.
This is why I use Mandrake 8.0 on my desktop, and Red Hat 7.1 on my server, though Mandrake 8.0 has some VERY interesting, and easy GUI based setups for several of the server apps that is making me consider trying it out as a server.
This is what I do: I ALWAYS go buy a copy of the latest Red Hat or Mandrake (Have since 6.2 and 7.0 respectively). Why? Because I feel I should give something to the people who are giving me this software that costs FAR less than it's worth. $30-40 for a Linux distro is a far better deal than `Doze.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
"all your base are belong to debian :)"
preach on, brotha!
"As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood." Well, you're right that BSD doesn't have the market share that other OS's have, but I don't know whether the market share of the BSDs is going up or down. Nor do I know if Walnut Creek/BSDi/Wind River has ever made, is, or ever will make money on BSD, nor does it matter. See, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD are projects, not companies. They're not about making money per se, but about solving problems, making a good OS, and having a good time at it all. If Wind River or whoever goes down the tubes, the BSDs are going to keep going, because they're developed independent of any commercial entity.
I didn't even know where Mandrake was based lol.
But if Mandrake does fall, (the company) it will still survive, (the OS), because it is an OSS and will be worked on.
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
RH could take it over, but then there'd be that faction accusing RH of becoming Linux's MS.
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
Well, its not as bad as it sounds. They're laying off mainly high priced American managers on the reasoning that they can't do a US IPO right now, so get rid of the Americans. Fine, get rid of the Frenchies because their wine sucks..pfft
Mandrake is doing though, what most tech companies are doing, laying off and firing people, although not as high level and drastic as Mandrake has done. I hope this doesn't affect their distro, (yes it will). Mandrake is such a high quality OS. I had RH first and get Mandrake later and stuck with Mandrake.
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
SLACKWARE!
Sales and marketing staff were supposedly affected least by the cuts.
So they fire the tech staff and keep the marketing droids who can't sell their free product.
Sounds like quite a plan.
I don't care about corporate fuck-all, could care less about business plans, stock price and strategy are completely irrelevant to me, but this sucks. Mandrake is the first distro that just worked for me. Super simple for my amatuer self, no problems, just simply worked the first time. i'm one of those y'all on slashdot are always talking about, a non-CS guy who used Windows until slowly being corrupted by Linux. Now, after trying 8.0, which was even easier to use than 7.2, I'm hooked on Mandrake as my distro of choice. I'm hatin' the fact that this will cause inevitable disruption and speculation about the direction of mandrake's future. Boo. I like their product, I hate to see them have trouble just as they're becoming a truly convenient alternative to Windows for the non super-technical crowd.
This sig may be reproduced by anyone for any reason.
Actually, I thought it looked more like the United States is slowly but surely being "voted off the island."
I see three possible outcomes to this
1) Mandrake keeps on doing what it does best - produce a desktop friendly distribution. This is my preferred outcome, and is not unreasonable. Mandrake are still one of the more popular distributions and their Macmillan publishing deal probably brings in more than a few bucks.
2) Mandrakesoft goes under - but the distribution keeps on going as a community project (a bit like Debian). Not unimagineable given the strong community involvement in the development of distribution releases through Cooker.
3) Mandrakesoft gets bought out by a big hardware company that can see a benefit in developing its own distribution. Imagine IBM buying up Mandrakesoft. So long as they maintain community involvement through Cooker, and partner this with the QA IBM could provide (especially with their own hardware) you could end up with a very good hardware/software combination indeed. Keeping a community involvement would be good for IBM (PR anyway) - they can move into the distribution game without antagonising community developers Given the work Mandrake have put into user-friendliness, if they wanted a desktop distribution, Mandrake is probably a good starting point.
Just a few wildly uninspiring thoughts....
I come from a LAN down under
Where the packets flow and routers chunder
Don't re-think it. I think you will be very happy with the boxed set, and if you need help, drop an email. Also the lists (newbie, expert, and cooker are still very effective places to go for help). -Chris
I have been watching this conversation go on for a day now and while tempted to reply have not done so until now.
I am an ex-Mandrakesoft employee. I did not leave the company as a part of the layoffs, but a few months prior to all of this going on. The writing was on the wall. I was seeing to much of Corporate America starting to grow within a company that wasn't a part of Corporate America. For those of you whom work in large corporations you can understand that.
It is my sincere beleif that what is going on is a good thing. Mandrakesoft has been through a turmendous amount of termoil over the last year primarily brought on by an American CEO and CIO that attempted to take a small, but very effective, Paris based company and jumpstart them into a .com IPO. There was a culture class.
I think that if people investigated a little further several of the people mentioned in the article left on their own accord, and not part of a layoff or a mass firing. I do not know all the details, but I will share mine. Please understand there may be some holes in my story as I do not want to do ANYTHING to hurt the company that I still believe in.
About a year and 3 months ago I left a very good job with Aetna Healthcare (Insurance) to go to work for Mandrake. I was hired because of my work on the KDE project, I had been doing packaging on my own and one day I got an email asking me if I would like to get paid for what I did. It was my dream job, however, never before hearing of a "hire by email" oppurtunity I thought long and hard before making the move. Close to 10 years with another company and moving to a small Paris based company was a really tough decision to make. When I made the move I took a $5,000.00 per year pay cut and a cut in bennefits as well. But it was worth it.
For the next 6 months I worked out of my home, relying on email and IRC and infrequent conference calls to communicate with my collegues. Then changes started happening. First, I started doing a lot of Linux training classes and some of these where for MandrakeSoft. Others for a small startup company in North Haven, CT named Innovation Software Group, LLC (http://www.innovationsw.com/training). These classes where soon picked up on by Mandrake management in Los Angeles (US office). I was asked by the US manager to put together a plan for starting training in the US. I was also given a change of job title to North American Training Coordinator.
Around this same time the new CEO started changing peoples job descriptions and brining a lot of outside people into the company. Most of these people had never worked outside of the Corporate world before. And had never even seen Linux before. Things suddenly became very political, and most of us found ourselves first out of the communication chain, and second unable to get any answers to questions we had. I do not know how it was for the people in the Paris office, but for me working remotly it was hell. Once of the few things a remote employee has to rely on is proper communication.
As a part of this communication gap came along the announcement of the purchase of a "training company" named CourseMetrics, out of Berkly, CA. This company was supposed to be an expert in training. Late in January I visited this company and came away with a very different opinion. It was a company in failure. It was a strugling .com company that for some unknown reason was being purchased. The people in that company did not even have an idea of what Linux was and all they had ever done in training was to write surveys. There was no bennefit to Mandrakesoft.
But this visit also showed me something else. I had the oppurtunity to observe our new mgmt in action. For a week I was around and watching all the US based managers that had taken a firm grip on all parts of Mandrakesoft. All of a sudden all IT functions where being directed by a US managers, sales by a US manager, and so on. The biggest concern for me was I was seeing the start of a corporate "you kiss my ass and I'll kiss yours" power play that I had seen before in my prior life at Aetna. I had no wish to go back to that life.
So I gave 60 days notice and gave them a few options to retain me. This didn't happen so I left.
I found out afterwards that the US managers whom I reported to never even informed the Paris managers of my reasons for leaving. I was a little surprised and dissapointed. They all thought that I was mad at Mandrakesoft and in truth I was worried and dissapointed. I will probably be forced to go back to work for a coproration, at 35 years old I do not have many options as I need to start thinking about retiring sometime in the next 30 years. I had really hoped that Mandrakesoft would take me there as I am still one of those people who believes in employee employer loalty and long term commitments.
The reason for me making this know is to make you aware that the changes that have happened are good things. I believe that with the management team led by Henri Poole out of the way only good things will happen. The prior management team (the founders) who have now regained control of the company have been able to do the job very well before and I think given the oppurtunity will do so again. The technical staff and the general support staff that remain in both the US, Canada, and in Paris are some of the most dedicated people I have ever met. We have seen the comments on newsforge about accepting pay cuts to help the company survive. I will almost put money that most of them have accepted this in some way or another unless it was totally an imposibility. There is a lot of pride behind their product and rightfully so.
Please give them the benifit of the doubt, do not start rumors to hurt them, and please go to your nearest store and buy a boxed set. If you do not run Mandrake yourself, hey, give a copy to a friend who is still stuck in the Windows world.
I am currently working as an independent Linux instructor and the only build I feel comfortable teaching linux to newbies on is Mandrake. I do not want to see it go away or become less than a quality product.
Chris Molnar
molnarc@nebsllc.com
Business is built on ownership in different forms like property, trading, trademarks and patents.
The GPL is aimed at removing ownership (read, "why software should not have owners" on the GNU homepage if you haven't got that), of cause it hurts businesses! That's its core goal! You, who suggest it doesn't, listen to yourself for Christ sake!
However, it doesn't hurt business as much as it hurts programmers. Programmers should _give_ their work away for free.
Don't suggest that programmers should move towards service&support instead. Try to spend $1 million dollars on development and then try to make that up on support when _anyone_ who hasn't spent the money can compete with you without the costs. Don't work...
A business can actually be successful by building pseudo-ownership like trademark. An example of this is Redhat that most people associate Linux with. For them the Linux developers are free labour really. That it's technically service&support really doesn't mean anything. People go to Redhat because they want Linux solutions, not because they think it's a service.
They all get much work done by volunteers for free. Free labour.
If you split the total income from free software on all the people developing it you will find that there is _no way_ people can live on it.
What kind of solution is that? Most programmers should give their work away for free so that others with strong trademarks can sell it instead (call it support if you think that's more fun).
Do Volvo and Toyota give their blueprints away?
How come people think business secrets are something exclusive to software?
IP is a huge part of ANY business.
How come that each and every time some person post an observation that companies the must give their work away gives them financial problems they get modded down as trolls?
all your base are belong to debian :)
'Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things.'
Um Brett, I am looking at your paragraph and nowhere inside it do I see that the GPL is "anti-programmer" or will hurt their wages. Am I missing something?
Little tip: it actually says that there are more benefits to writing code than just monetary rewards. That is a far cry from "Use my evil GPL and I will take your money and company."
Have you ever contributed to either license? Have you ever released code under either license? Let me tell you, if you wrote code you would think much differently. You may prefer one license over another but there is no way you would carry on the way you have been doing so on Slashdot. Im unsure of your goal, but you are leaving a bad impression of yourself and your mission is being clouded by your bigotry.
Explain to me why we need people doing all they can to undo free work merely because it is under a certain license?
I still remember the first one of these I read years ago... there was a coupon on the side of a 6-pack of Samuel Adams beer announcing their upcoming IPO. I sent away for the prospectus. After reading the warnings in their filings, I concluded that the beer industry is a terrible business to be in; no beer stock for me.
It looks like too many tipsy consumers bought into the IPO, though. The stock dropped alot the first year, then has been flat. However, they're still in business, and the P/E is only 14. It didn't turn out as bad as it could have.
So, do I stay with Redhat or choose a different distribution? What's good these days? I started with Slackware and moved to Redhat because I could get more "goodies" in RPM format. What other distributions support RPM format installs (or some other format with huge application base)?
GreyPoopon
--
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Good for you.
I have a different tactic. I tend to hang around
the Red Hat and Mandrake boxes at the local Best
Buy. If I see somebody checking them out
closely, I always make sure they know about
Cheapbytes.com. They can buy a CheapBytes CD and
then get a good book on Linux, for about the same
price as that shrinkwrapped (and mostly empty)
box.
It's the perceived value you add to their business that counts.
If you can prove you add value by using a free tool, the tool becomes irrelevant.
Jan
That's what I call team spirit! Good for Mandrake!
I can't blame their employees for supporting it.
Of course, seeing a company with good intentions (and, in my opinion, a good product) bite the dust is a sad thing -- not uncommon in our times. But maybe this is all for the better. To put it harshly, the bankruptcies of many companies - isps and linux distributions to name a couple - may be part of a "weeding" process, in the darwinistic sense of the word. Yes, it means adversity for actual people, but Linux may benefit. The consolidation of Linux distributions into a strong few, each commanding a sizable chunk of the linux market share, seems like a good future. I'd love to see a BSD-style distribution setup for linux - each distro targeted (and excelling at) a specific purpose. Of course, they'd all be based on the same kernel, so there would be more collaboration than between the BSDs. It would certainly make porting easier :)
I was just laid off from a dot.com that was shut down by the VCs because they did not think we would make money on account of the GPL. They stopped development right in the middle. We had a good product but the VCs were scared to pay for development because they thought that someone like Eazel would come along and do the same thing for free. Yes they might fail like Eazel did but they would take us down with them. They used Eazel as an example because Mandrake had not announced layoffs yet. I am one of the voices on Slashdot that agrees with you.
I just found a speech online by a guy named Kirk McKusick who calls what you call copyforward "copycenter." You just take the code down to the copy center and make all of the copies you want for any reason you want, no questions asked. If you want to make a better product out of it then that is cool. This sounds as if it is better for businesses 'cause it doesn't force them to give away what they do. Maybe Mandrake would have made it if they used that code instead.
You can buy GPL'd cd's.
You can make a donation to the development area of your choice.
I think the linux community should use this as a wake up call. Most linux users buy their distributions from on-line retailers like Cheapbytes or download from the net. It is time for the users to put their money where their mouth is. If you like a distribution, buy the boxed set. Continue to support that distribution by buying every release, even if you don't need it.
It is a shame to see Mandrake take the hit. They really helped but Linux on the desktop and promote KDE as a viable desktop.
PS> I don't use Mandrake or KDE but I recognize their acheivments. And yes evevry distribution I own is an "official" boxed set and I have bought boxed sets that I don't use on a regular basis to support those companies. They make great gifts.
Mandrake is an excellent distro, especially for beginners who are looking for something less scattered than RedHat. Mandrake has continued to set the standard for ease of use and functionality. I hope they stay around for the sake of the linux community.
----------What the Chiquita banana?
I am a full time user of Mandrake on my home computer. I use it quite simply because it works... Fast and Easy.
If you're like me and use Mandrake you probably know about Mandrake Forum.It is a place where developers and users share their experiences using the product. Over the last 6 months users have been going out of their way trying to find a way to support Mandrakesoft. I probably saw over 30-40 posts asking for some type of at home subscription service users could throw money at. But nothing happened!
What we did receive was a simple donations page where you could dump a few bucks. (Which I Did)
To me this is crazy, users have been asking for subscription baised distributions for a long time. If Mandrake would just put out a magazine that included periodic updates they'd have a userbase they could count and direct market other products. Which would drive up the stock price before the IPO.
Simply stupid, Instead let's fire the Americans give out our shit for free and Piss everyone off.
You don't get it. Most Mandrake users are either
1st New to Linux
or
2nd Extremely Lazy (Like me)
The new users are often very experienced Windows users that are trying Linux because they've heard rumers of stability. Mandrake is in a unique position, able to introduce their type of Linux before users are even aware of names like Slackware, Debian, etc...
Mandrake needs to capitolize on the new users excitement. Buy opening doors to incomming developers and users alike.
Market a Mandrake Magazine full of tips, hints, and intros to their new operating system. In the Magazine you can sell other products to users you already know support your platform as well as sell advertising space to a userbase that will probably soon need new products and services.
I can't understand why mandrake is so dense when it comes to marketing a monthly newsletter type offering.
EVERYONE BENIFITS!
But the company can earn enough money in selling somes Linux Boxes. It is odd, I must admit that, (especially when I know that SuSE was leader in February and March) but a Linux company must receive money from huge companies that choose Linux system. I hope you understand me. For instance, IBM can provide support and advertising for SuSE and Redhat. These companies can earn money from support. Unlike Mandrake, Both companies earn money monthly for nothing (only support). I really think it is sad that Mandrake will probably close down. But only 2 or 3 Linux Company can survive.