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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."
Well, make that 7,999 members more, I guess, though I didn't see where they mentioned how many members they've got.
I don't even run Mandrake, but I have been giving it serious consideration.
It seems quite reasonable for a Linux company to operate like PBS and Public Radio do, to me.. free product? Used by millions? Sure, I'll chip in for that. They've even got premiums!
Seriously, though, this shit can't go on forever, can it?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
I see Mandrake as a fantastic Linux distro. I commonly recommend it above Red Hat and even above the otherwise really great (but more effortful to install) Debian. Definitely, it's what I suggest to my Windows colleagues for a taste of Linux.
Anyways, that's what's kind of ironic about their plea for a subscription-based Member Club. Their perfect niche is Linux newbies, but those newbies probably won't grok the concept of why they should subscribe monthly for their OS. (In fact, it tends to be the Linux crowd shouting at them to NOT buy into evil subscription models that are coming down the pipe by Microsoft.) And those of us that "get" it and recognize how important Mandrake could be are likely "move on" to other distros like Debian (for their social contract)), or maybe even dip into something like OpenBSD (for its priorities on security and robustness). Anyways, as I'm skipping around installing different distros for different purposes, it's hard for me to buy into a Membership for just one. Sigh.
Mandrake, your excellent installer has probably got you unfairly pigeonholed!
bias: I'm not a linux guru, but I've had other CS students ask me a thing or two about linux.
/dev/whatever seemed so stupid when I could just do C: before...) Eventually I got my system accepting modem calls from two modems, but it was painful.
Back in my early teens, I thought I was *the* power user. I wrote help files telling people how they could put "C:\BATCH" in their path and start up wordperfect, games, anything at all by just typing "wp" or "wolf3d".
Thinking about starting my own ISP, I had heard about this thing called Unix and BSD being really, really good for running servers. Having lots of time on my hands, I got a copy of FreeBSD and threw myself at it, sans manuals or knowledge of "man" (at first) for 48 hours. I made SOME progress and can still remember how weird it was to have a hard drive as a file! (mount
My ego smashed, I didn't touch anything resembling Unix for a while.
I started playing around with Linux a few months before I started my CS program - not knowing that it'd end up being my developement OS for a few years - and I picked up SuSe, RedHat and Mandrake.
Suse had hardware issues and I just didn't get like their config utilities. Redhat was a step up, but I tried Mandrake and found my distro of choice. Things weren't easy at first but with a minimum of effort, I got things going.
After finding out "Mandrake = stupid user linux" and "Debian = if you are smart enough, THEN you can use this one", I started feeling I need to prove myself. Which put me back to my teen years and reminded me *way* too much of high school. This time, I didn't bend and I stuck with Mandrake - I could get things done, the company seemed to be going in a direction I liked and the software seemed to be fairly new and easily updatable (when MandrakeUpdate worked).
Mandrake might not be the best linux for everyone. But I wanted to get something done, without learning EVERYTHING. I had time for that when I was younger.
The $60US I just sent (direct credit card payment, SSL and took less than 30 seconds) might not save the company, but for the effort they saved me, it's not nearly enough.
I hope Mandrake has a long and successful future, and if you are using Mandrake now - how much time has it saved you? Can you afford to eat if you give them $60 per year? Likely, yes.
See the subject. reply if you want.
Mandrake pays programmers to develop this GNU you are talking about. so unless you want to code your GNU/Linux apps, and update them, and patch them, yourself, by hand - don't talk about what a waste paying money to Mandrake is. You are paying for the future.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Would anybody really be upset if we were only left with SuSE, Slackware, Debian (& RedHat I suppose).
Mandrake does a lot of work in internationalizing code and has bought and freed several programs. As a Debian developer, I certainly prefer them around to SuSE, who rarely helps anyone but themselves.
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?)
Why do I care about Loki? What Linux apps do I want to spend money on? Mandrake has given me much more than spending money on any Linux apps would.
I have been using Mandrake for a couple of years now and just made my first donation ( besides buying the McMillian boxed copy).
The Mandrake crew ( like many others) are turning out terrific software and asking those that appreciate the work to compensate the makers so they can continue working on their distribution. If you don't want to donate, then just close your hole and stop trying to convince others to ignore the request for help.
If people are intelligent enough to earn enough to support themselves and have some left over that they have to decide how to spend, then they just may also be intelligent enough to spend it wisely.
I'm not so tight that I begrudge these people a bit of support for their work. I also bought RedHat and Caldera boxed Linux when I was running them, it dosen't bother me to pay for quality software, how about you?
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
This touches on an important point which most of the people posting in this article need to realize: The fact that Mandrake being a company that supports and sells Open Source software is completely irrelevant to the real issue here, which is Economics 101.
There's a market for Linux distros. That's obvious. RedHat's making a profit, Mandrake's on track to. However, that doesn't mean there's a market for all the distros out there that want to make money on packaging, services, and support.
If the market isn't large enough to support all the distros that are in business today, some of them have to go, plain and simple. Either through closing the doors or consolidating with another distro to lower costs. Once that happens (perhaps a few times over), the market will have itself a few distros who can actually operate profitably. And this is a good thing, even if it means we lose some distros!
Sure, Mandrake wouldn't be my first choice to prune from the list, but that's not up to me, or to any of us as individuals, it's up to the market as a whole.
I don't know why anyone feels commercial Linux distros should be treated as though they're special. They're selling a product. They're a business. Yes, they love Open Source, we do to, and we're glad they're here. None of that matters when it comes down to keeping the doors open, because if they can't keep the doors open on their own, the sure as hell aren't going to by panhandling before their userbase. And frankly, I'd rather see just a handful of Linux companies succeed than a whole lot of them scrape by.
Some people don't like the idea of "donating" to a publically traded company. I tend to think of it not so much a "donation" but rather
1. My thanks to the great work done by the Mandrake developers.
2. My investment in the future. Mandrake developers contribute heavily to Open Source. By giving them money, I invest in the future of Open Source Software. No matter what occurs in the future, their work will always exist for free and open usage. 5 years from now, I wont have to buy it again from a proprietary vendor.
The point is that many Windows people will turn to Linux to find out how good "free" can be. They don't understand RMS yet. They don't understand the distinction between different "free" definitions. Can't blame them. It takes a little while for that kind of paradigm shift. Anyways, a typical Windows user has been lulled into such comfort that he doesn't have a hope of installing any Linux distro except maybe Mandrake. And now it seems to be going commercial like they perceive the Open/Free/Linux crowd says is so evil. I'm not saying this pereception is correct, but I believe it will happen and may be hard for a newbie to understand. Anyways, so perhaps they'll turn to something truly non-commercial like Debian, say, and have a really rough time at it and then just give up on Linux. Perhaps. I truly hope not. Just throwing out a prediction here and some reasoning behind it.
There are a lot of buisness plans that work well with open source. However, making money by selling distributions isnt one of them. Especially not selling distributions in an market which is as crowded as this.
Any distribution created after Redhat is pretty much doomed. Redhat does the job well enough, it has the necessary marketshare and corporate mindshare, it has the best long-term chance of survival (of the commercial dists), and it's giving back enough to the community.
The fragmentation in the distribution market does little good for the community. There is room for maybe two or three distributions total, and those would, in my opinion, be primarily Debian and Redhat. One is a not-for-profit, and one is a commercial vendor who has, since the beginning, understood that they wont make money selling free software.
SuSE has been playing far too close to the line of proprietary to be well accepted among the Free Software people and, like it or not, those are often the ones who push linux internally in corporations, the market SuSE is after.
Mandrake is nice, but began as RedHat+KDE, which aint exactly a major selling point. It has since improved and diverged, but the very diverging that makes it not-redhat makes it not-supported-by-vendors for server use. For the desktop market, what is needed isnt another distribution, it's improvement of the existing distributions. Ximian got that one right, but it remains to be seen if they can capitalize on it.
The rest of the distributions have a snowballs chance in hell of ever making any money.