MandrakeSoft Files for Bankruptcy Protection

An anonymous reader writes "It's official: MandrakeSoft has filed a 'declaration de cessation des paiements' - the French equivalent of a U.S. Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. From a statement issued by the company: 'This reorganization of liabilities enables MandrakeSoft to continue its current operations, which are showing increases in revenue and significant decreases in expenses. MandrakeSoft's strategic partners are supporting the company in this process and the MandrakeSoft team is focused on continuing to deliver high quality services and products to its customers.' Best wishes to MandrakeSoft as they work through this process."

Comments

Here's your chance (not mine).

[BoomerSooner]

Hate to tell you this but free software can survive just fine. It's a bloated company based on free software that cannot.

Why the hell should I give my hard earned money to a company that isn't doing enough innovative stuff to be able to sell their product? RedHat and Apple don't seem to have these problems.

Realistically how many people does it take to make a distribution? Patrick V of slackware probably doesn't do it alone yet I wouldn't be surprised if he did.

If you really want to contribute just write free code. Otherwise stfu about "contributing" to a bad business model.

To say it in french, "Je m'en fiche".

Re:Here's your chance (not mine).

[johnlenin1]

Not everyone who wants to support open-source software is a coder. And I wouldn't dream of recommending Slackware or Debian to such types.

Distros like Mandrake give the typical user a useable-right-from-the-box alternative to Windows, and this is a good thing.

And Mandrake not innovative? Please. Multi Network Firwewall, MandrakeClub, letting the users pick the packages they want in the distro, all the Drak tools that make administration easier for a newbie, an installation easier and quicker than Windows...every bit of this is innovative. All this while maintaining a commitment to GPL sofware. I am happy to support a company like that.

Hold donations for now.

[bstadil]

There is a few comments urging for donations at this juncture.

This might be a mistake. If you donate now the money might go into the distribution fund available to the creditors. Please email Mandrake (I did) asking them to set up a separate untouchable account that only becomes available once the appointed Judge has approved the bankrupcy distribution and reorganization plan.

The fund should be earmarked for development as well.

Why not eliminate free (as in beer) ISOs?

[Fnkmaster]

Given how widely used and well liked Mandrake is, I wonder if they would be better eliminating free (as in beer/herpes/cost) ISOs as several other distros have done before them. I am a paying member of MandrakeClub, because I use Mandrake 9.0 and generally find it to be a great Desktop Linux. Urpmi is awesome, finally addressing the biggest weaknesses of RPM vs. DEB/apt-get - at least it's a lightyear better than where RPM was a few years ago. The Mandrake install is pretty smooth even for a newbie. And Mandrake gives you pretty much everything you need for a power user (well, I still take some issue with some of their default RPM choices, but they are correcting these issues as we speak).

Mandrake has done a fabulous job with 9.0 - amazingly good for a .0 release. The biggest weaknesses as I see it are that they still don't seem to release that if you are selling and marketing a desktop Linux distro, you MUST ship decent fonts and good anti-aliasing support built in. I had to download the Texstar RPMs to get Xft support working well and get my distro looking pretty. They are a company - they ought to license some damned decent TrueType fonts and ship em out of the box. Red Hat has a much better looking default desktop install, and it's not newbie-compliant to require two to three hours of tweaking a fresh install to get a decent looking desktop (the fact that their tool to import Windows fonts breaks ruggedly if you try to import from an NTFS filesystem - i.e. 80% of Win2k and WinXP installations is also unacceptable in a release-quality piece of software).

I feel like if they just went not even an extra mile, but an extra 100 yards they'd have a fabulous distro. I've finally migrated back to using Mandrake much of the time, which I abandoned a few years ago (for my day-to-day desktop work) for Windows 2000 since desktop usability was just not there yet, and because I needed Outlook and Word on a daily basis for work. Thank god OpenOffice.org has solved the Word issue for me, and Ximian mostly addresses the Outlook issue (though thankfully I no longer need the Outlook calendaring features that everybody at my old company fucking loved).