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Mandrake Policy Change Angers Users

Posted by michael on from the seasons-change dept.

phalse phace writes "Yahoo! News is carrying a ZDNet News article which reveals that Mandrake has decided to change its policy regarding its Mandrake Club. Previously, Mandrake stated that all membership levels would enjoy the same benefits. But since Mandrake Linux 8.2 will include StarOffice 6.0 and Sun is charging for it, they decided to only allow the download of SO 6.0 to Silver members and higher."

1 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Email from Hemos about the OSDN Navbar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait
    I got this in email today. Is this legit?

    Dear Subscriber,

    As you may have noticed, the OSDN navbar has grown in size. Although we here at Slashdot have an assful of bugs resulting from garage-style ad-hoc open sores development, this is not a bug.

    This is a feature.

    Allow me to explain. It seems that our subscription model was ill conceived. If Slashdot gets as much money from subscribers as non-subscribers, then the advertisement views have shrunk by the amount of subscribers, with no benefit to us whatsoever.

    This was clearly a brain-dead plan because now our advertisers have a smaller audience and therefore pay us less.

    The irony is that we were thinking "gee, we are glad we got away from the ads-only model" when in fact, we ourselves have killed the effectiveness of this model.

    Therefore we must being to increase both the size of the ads and the size of the OSDN navbar, effective immediately. Both subscribers and non-subscribers will be subjected to the new large OSDN navbar.

    We have taken our cue from MandrakeSoft and followed their lead with their subscription model; we hope you learn to like it.

    Thanks,
    Slashdot Editors