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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."
By all means, if you think Mandrake is the best thing since sliced bread, support them. However, I think given that they want to be a company that wants to derive profit from making a Linux distribution people will buy, one may well ask the question: why? There is nothing wrong with being for-profit, but if they can't make a good business out of it now, why should they be able to in the future?
I mean, it's only $5 and it was the first distribution I thought got it right for intermediate/beginner Linux users. Folks like me who, at the time, knew quite a bit about computers and programming, but knew nothing about Linux. Plus it was the easiest to install early on for folks (again, like me) who had grown used to the relative ease of install and use of Windows and the Mac.
FWIW, I first installed an early 5.x of Red Hat but got ticked when it didn't work with my sound card. It took me about a month to learn everything I needed to get sound working. After that, I muddled along with Red Hat for a while, but Mandrake came along and really added some value to what Red Hat had done, IMHO. The install recognized everything and even got X working properly. It also helped that the distro included more up-to-date packages (esp. of GNOME and KDE) and the -- probably worthless to me in the grand scheme of things, but still a factor -- pentium optimizations.
Best of all, I think they've kept up their end of the bargain. They consistently provide a really good distro with up-to-date packages. They've done a lot of work on getting Linux to recognize hardware more seemlessly.
Yep, all things considered I think they're worth $5.
--- but I don't want a "sig".
This seems to be a losing proposition, in the end. Begging users for handouts? Will Mandrake move to the public radio-method of fundraising? "Hi, your boot is interrupted this week to ask, 'User, do you enjoy Mandrake enough to pay $10 a month, or $20 a month? Become a member now, and we'll throw in a Signature Logo t-shirt, signed by RMS'"
This is where normal businesses say "what we're doing isn't working--let's try something else". Mandrake (or any Free Software-based business) doesn't have to show massive profits, but it does have to keep the doors open.
Selling the CDs don't work. Too easy to download ISOs, too easy to simply compile new apps. Selling services works, but only to a select few. RedHat may be able to get away with it, but isn't Mandrake a French company? Too far away, conceptually if not literally.
What is Mandrake's raison d'etre? A desktop-friendly Linux, if I'm not mistaken. Mandrake used to be a rip-off of RedHat, before it matured.
If Mandrake can cut costs by returning to that model--a "wrapper" around a RedHat install that caters to the needs of a desktop user. It can leech off RedHat for the hard stuff, and focus it's energies (and money) on keeping the doors open.
I hate to see them die, but duplicating effort can kill a small company. Unless Mandrake decides to finance the nerds with MandrakePorn. That, I understand, is doing okay.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Why the heck would I want to subsidise a for-profit company? If they want money, they should issue more stock. This is a for PROFIT company. They seem to be trying to get money from people without having to dilute their stock... They are a publicly traded company (on some french micro-market). RedHat issued stock twice in a very succesful IPO and post-IPO offering. Why can't they do the same? If I give them money, I want to share the profits if there ever are any.
This is not a charity! If you want to help Free Software, give to the FSF or SPI (www.spi-inc.org aka the debian foundation).. They will even give you tax deduction.
Giving Mandrake Inc. money is just throwing it out of the window! If they can't make money as a for-profit company, well they should and they deserve to go bankrupt. At least, its all free software and someone else can maybe pick it up and make a business with a serious business model.
Please stop that non-sense! If you want to give, give to a charity!
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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
I hope the Mandrake employees read this Slashdot news an don't float the company any personal loans or hang on too long without pay like Loki employees did.
I don't know, it seems odd to me for a publicly traded company to post a notice like that asking for financial support in the form of donations. That seems like it would panic the shareholders and hurt them even more in the long run. The sensible thing would be to lay off those emplyees not contributing to the core of Mandrake's business and save some money in those non revenue generating areas.
'Same speed C but faster'
instead of enriching those who use the world for support.
I am no longer running Mandrake on any of my computers, but it was the best distro I've come across (only missing apt-get). The installer eased me into the world of linux, diskdrake is lightyears ahead of fdisk, and the command center is sorely missed in other distros. I never would have been able to learn linux without their help. An encrypted filesystem might be enough to convince me to upgrade to a supported video card and give Mandrake a fourth (lifetime... the other three have been given away) computer.
Mandrake, and community software, are like public television... They do philanthropic deeds for many people, but philanthropy is never profitable. They need money? I own a box set, and I haven't had an income in 5 months, but Mandrake is worth it to me. Count my Donation.
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