Mandrake Asks for Support

Many people wrote in with this news: "Mandrake Linux today reports having a short-term money crunch. They call for users to become members to help float them through the short-term viability issue. Membership dues are the preferred method over budget/project cuts."

Comments

Weed the Herd ! ! ! !

[evilviper]

I always hear people making noise about supporting your favorite distro. Personally, I could care less if 90% of the Linux distros disappeared. Let Mandrake die... It's just a bastard distro of a bastard distro.

Would anybody really be upset if we were only left with SuSE, Slackware, Debian (& RedHat I suppose). You can always make your own, and/or customize one of the existing distros to fit your needs.

Save the money would would normally spend to bail out a distro company, and instead spend it on Linux apps. (Have you forgotten about Loki already?)

Re:Time to rethink strategy

[rho]

You think your purchasing a CD will save the company? You are an idiot.

Re:I'm not sending them anything

[Eric Damron]

I assume that you are trolling but I'll bite.

"I use Mandrake, but I for one do not plan to send them anything. And I plan to continue using Mandrake, for free, because that is exactly what their business model calls for."

Translation: I am a low-life leach who will never contribute to a company suppling valued software, even if I use it, as long as I'm not forced to do so.

"If open-source is a viable business model, as is so often argued here, then it deserves to be judged by hard, cold, business metrics - namely, whether companies based on this model can survive on their merits alone."

Translation: my narrow minded opinion is that "open-source" must be free (as in beer). And I would NEVER consider donating money to the cause unless I am forced to do so.

"Contrary and au-courant opinions aside, it appears that most companies based on this model CAN'T survive, and Mandrake appears to be just one in what is a growing list of failures. Consumers AND the capital markets appear to have spoken somewhat decisively on Mandrake."

Translation: I must justify my cheap, tight fisted, parasitically attitude.

"And if Mandrake ultimately ends up surviving, by measure of donations/contributions, I'll judge it as a feasible example of a charity case. Because it seems clear that Mandrake is not going to survive on the merit of the saleability of its products and can only survive by appeals to the goodwill of the open-source community."

Translation: Mandrake is good enough for me to use but if it fails financially then it's products cannot sell and must depend on the goodwill of the open-source community. I have no such goodwill and will leach off of the company until it fails, never considering that supporting the company might be the right thing to do.

"But the long-term problem is (and it IS a long-term problem, not a short-term one as the source post claims), the community only has so much pocket change to give to so many panhandlers."

Translation: In order to justify my position I will liken the Mandrake company to "panhandlers."

"There is no reason to suspect that a bit of cash here and now is going to somehow change the fundamental, underlying economic reality that there aren't many people willing to pay for software which by rights they don't have to pay for."

Translation: I like being forced to pay huge prices for Microsoft products and will never support the open-source business model.

I know this will get modded down as flamebait, but

[madenosine]

Shouldnt Mandrake, as a company, be making money, instead of asking it's users for it? It's going to rid all investors of confidence in the business.

I mean come on a company is asking it's users for money!