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Mandrakesoft To IPO
Cpyder writes "LinuxFrench reports that Mandrakesoft (home of Mandrake Linux) are going public. Good luck to them!" The article is in French - use the fish for an...interesting...translation. Or try out GPLTrans.
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It turns it into spanglish!
An example from my page:
this página probablemente breaks many, si no lo más, of las reglas i've heard bandied about para correcto html el uso.
This could be hours of fun.
- A.P.
--
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Or option 3) spend 40 bucks for the cd set at compusa (like I did). Sure buying at a MegaStore(tm) is sometimes a sucky experience but demonstrating 'consumer demand' for linux can't be all that bad.
Unfornately I am stuck with redhat and all the latest versions of gnome and kde only have have rpm's for the latest or last 2 versions of mandrake or redhat or suse. If your behind you need to buy again and again. Kind of like a subscription. Hmmmm
How about FTP'ing them, just like you do your precious Deb packages? Lord I hate Debian FUD. There are plenty of reasons to use Debian no need to BS in order to make it look even better. This kind of CRAP benefits NO ONE
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
My experience exactly. People keep claiming how user friendly mandrake is. I have tried each version from 7.0 and each time I had the the same feeling: "which idiot decided to call *this* stable". Using mandrake brings back memories of the early windows 95. Random lock ups, stuff failing randomly. Ok there's no BSODs but I consider an X crash to be pretty much the same as the only realistic option for a newby user is to reboot. The 7.x version had a few nice bugs that made urpmi fuck up its database from time to time (this makes using the rpm packaging tools pretty risky, especially for newbies who can't figure out how to recover the db). Using the configuration utilities more than once during a session on 8.0 also reveals some interesting bugs. I recently tried to configure adsl with mandrake (which apparently is possible in my area). While it is nice that this can be done, I found the procedure to be unstable (segfaults!) so I did things from the commandline. In addition, using both kde and gnome on mandrake 8.0 I have experienced several lock ups in X.
In my experience Mandrakes testing procedures do not go beyond "works for me". They consistently release too early, meaning that there are serious bugs in off the shelf mandrake distributions.
I think this is unfortunate because there are some good ideas behind the distribution. The configuration tools have the potential to be very nice. However, their current instability makes using them somewhat dangerous since you may very well end up with a misconfigured system. Linuxconf is a good replacement in most cases though.
Jilles
It will be done in the "Marché Libre" [see the explaination in the letter below], near the end of July. According to this document, this IPO has the goal of permitting the persuit of fantastic growth in market share without having their hands tied by by investors who, as everyone knows, have become less generous with the new economy and are waiting (too) impatiently for a return on investment.
It will be done in the "Marché Libre" [see the explaination in the letter below], near the end of July. According to this document, this IPO has the goal of permitting [something -- seems garbled, or I just don't understand investment-French, or both] without having their hands tied by by investors who, as everyone knows, have become less generous with the new economy and are waiting (too) impatiently for a return on investment.
You will find in the complete text of the article the document, just as we received it.
This is sort of an assinine idea of Mandrake considering the following factors. Right now the economy is down, and people are scared of dumping money into tech stocks. Redhat just turned it's first profit, and their profits were miniscule. Redhat will also crush them, and considering Mandrake is a Redhat spinoff, more people will take Redhat more serious than its clone.
Now only that but Redhat just announced going DB, of which it should strengthen their position among the Linux distro's. So why would someone want to invest money in Mandrake when the alternatives look alot snappier? They'd either be desperate, and going out of business hoping some quick investors would be clueless to invest in them so they could continue, or as arrogant as people depict the French. (oui!)
Want Root?
Let's take a look at the average desktop user worthy to note that would spend capital on an OS, and note that the biggest market for this would have to be businesses. I've said it once a million times, it would cost companies an arm and a leg in downtime to move legacy systems over to anything other than MS, now that they've bastardized themselves into `find . -name *MS*` .
Aside from that, do you expect corporate types to understand how to compile programs, how to find the neccessary programs to support already business standardized documents such as
Sure you could make Mandrake as user friendly as possible, but it still won't look at good to CTO types who's only tech skills come as loading a cd and letting a self installer do its work for them. Its cost effective, and simpler that.
Want Root?
Mandrake will be IPOing. Gael, prepare the taunts and the cows. This time it's personal.
I can see the prospectus, "Mandraksoft, the only good thing in france!"
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Informative? He didn't even read the article!
They're filing for an IPO on the European market, so the SEC is of little interest.
Ni!
Hmmm.... A bit of an oversimplification?
Don't get me wrong, I like Mandrake. IMO, they have what it takes to be successful, and I think that they are an ideal distro for a small business (though I am thoroughly impressed also with RH7.1 and SUSE 7.1).
You also state: Red Hat simply isn't. I know people at Red Hat (many of them are in my LUG). They are absolutely stupid and clueless about anything relating to making anything usable. Mandrake makes many useful utilities that make linux easier for newcomers.
Mandrake has some advantages over SuSE-- better RPM support, etc. But, in general, I have been less than pleased with the server utilities in Mandrake. Given that the server market seems to be Mandrakes new primary area of focus, this will hurt them somewhat in many markets.
Of course, given the track records of companies trying to put linux on desktop (as opposed to just to doing server closet support), Mandrake will have a long and difficult fight ahead of them.
No one can do this as a distributor of Linux... Period. You cannot make much profit directly on your sales of CDs regarding Linux. Instead one has to do one of the following:
1: consult for corporations considering it on their desktops. (See Ximian)
2: Actually sell the consumer boxes which run Linux.
Someone has to pay the development costs when anyone can download the fruits of your labor. It is either the consumer who buyes it with their new Thunderbird 1.2GHZ system or by MegaWigits Inc. when they want their workstations to run Linux.
Mandrake is in for the fight of their life. But I do support them, for what it is worth.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Mandrake is definately better than Red Hat for the desktop. It's enhancement utilities (such as DrakFont) makes it MUCH more pleasurable to use for everyday use on my desktop. Including the GNOME SAMBA browser in Mandrake 8.0 makes it dead easy to connect it to a `Doze network as a client, or to my Red Hat server in the next room running SAMBA.
And I like the fact that Mandrake is more bleeding edge... They included Reiser back in version 7.0 (the first version I used). They were the first to ship with 4.0 of X.
However, Red Hat's conservatism makes it better suited for servers. My server runs Red Hat, and I'd not think of running anything else on it.
Good luck! It's ballsy going IPO now, but the upside is that Mandrake won't suffer the undeserved bad press of going up unrealisticly during a bubble and crashing back to reality as Red Hat did. I will certainly look into adding a few shares.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
"Now, DrakFont is definately awesome, and I applaud them for continuing to push the envelope."
I wish Red Hat would do something similar to DrakFont... It'd radically increase the look of their desktop. Mandrake's been doing it since 7.1, I wonder why RH doesn't borrow ideas back from the distro that originally was an improved Red Hat?
"Regardless, the developers are kick ass guys and have done tons for the community and have kept their stuff GPL, so regardless of what you think of their distro, they definately get a Good Luck(tm) from me"
Yep, compared to Caldera (which I'd nickname MSOpenActiveDirectLinux2000XP), Mandrake is a FAR better company to support. Mandrake contributes a ton to making Linux ready for the desktop and the newbie user. I've personally introduced several friends to Linux by handing them a copy of Mandrake.
Anyone who can install `Doze can install Mandrake.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
I've learned that Mandrakesoft is working to enable the entire community of users and contributors to take part in the IPO. As of now, MandrakeSoft is only able include European contributors for the "special" offering due to regulations -- US contributors aren't allowed to participate in the special 10% part of the IPO because the SEC forbids solicitation; however, US citizens can buy shares in the 30% open part. So it seems that people who are located outside of the ECC can participate in the "open" offering, or wait until after the IPO.
Mandrake and RedHat target different markets. As much has been said by RedHat. RedHat is not concerned w/ the desktop market. They want to keep their desktop users happy - but they're not going to go out of their way to attract the masses.
RedHat wants the server market. Low-end to mid-end right now, but perhaps the high-end as well in the future. Their decision w/ RedHat DB illustrates that point.
Mandrake on the other hand is widely considered the best choice for the desktop. They have other offerings too (Mandrake Firewall, etc) but their main market remains the desktop.
signature smigmature
- James
Mandrakesoft have problems with the first month of e-commerce because of two much order. Now it should be ok. So if you didn't not received it, it's not normal. please drop an email to service@mandrakestore.com.
Red Hat simply isn't. I know people at Red Hat (many of them are in my LUG). They are absolutely stupid and clueless about anything relating to making anything usable. Mandrake makes many useful utilities that make linux easier for newcomers. The UI for the mandrake installer is far more competantly designed than Anaconda. If Mandrake IPO's, redhat's position on anything other than a server is pretty much annihilated.
Of course, given the track records of companies trying to put linux on desktop (as opposed to just to doing server closet support), Mandrake will have a long and difficult fight ahead of them.
At any rate, I love Mandrake. I never thought I could ever love a bunch of Frogs this much. Personally, I think that if any distro is going to successfully conquer the laptop, it will be Mandrake.
Can anyone from Mandrake confirm this? For those who don't know, the COB is the French equivalent to the SEC. I'd hate to see the guys at Mandrake get into trouble for that...
/max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.