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A Community Takeover of Mandrake?
sombragris writes "Ben Reser wrote an interesting opinion about MandrakeSoft's current financial woes. Reser maintains that there's no great value in MandrakeSoft's current business model and that the best course of action for Mandrake Linux would be a community or non-profit takeover of the Mandrake distribution. Sounds definitely interesting..."
Someone correct me if I'm worng, but it bears little resemblance to emergence from bankruptcy that US companies enjoy.
Well, US companies can file under chapter 7 or chapter 11. Under chapter 7, they are closed completely, but under chapter 11 they are allowed to continue to operate while they restructure their business.
Many big and high-profile companies file under chapter 11, but in fact there are many more chapter 7 filings in total.
Tor
according to the actual announcement it looks very much like what we 'murkins would expect from Chapter 11
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
There was a comment at the Newsforge article which I think said the same thing - French bankruptcy is killer. I'm pretty sure there were several refutations about that, including one at Slashdot:
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=50817&cid=5
Quote:
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Under French bankruptcy law these penalties [getting out of E-education contracts] would be voided and the remaining company (the company that sells a Linux distribution) would be viable.
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Things are probably not as bad as they seem.
While I am no slouch when it comes to Linux, Mandrake is the only distribution I will use. I refuse to spend hours of my time editing config files which I can simply click Mandrake Control Center and have everything working in 5 minutes. Out of at least a dozen systems I've installed Mandrake 9 to, in each case, after install, the system was 100% usable, all hardware autodetected, autoconfigred, etc. Saved me tons of time. Why anyone would WANT to piddle with config file when they don't have to is beyond me - and if config file editing is your thing, what's keeping you from doing that in Mandrake?
3d issues? I've never had a problem with 3d in Mandrake. I download the Nvidia RPMs and go. On my ATI system, the dirvers were automatically installed. I've never had a problem running games such as UT2003, RTCW, or Counter-Strike (through WineX).
If Mandrake dies, I will be faced with a tough choice. I had problems with RedHat (plus I'm a KDE nut),SUSE refused to work properly with my video card (an nVidia card), and I don't think I'd like Lindows or Xandros (though I'd try them if Mandrake died). I would probably end up going to Windows, something that I swore I would never do.
So, all of you wanting Mandrake dead - just remember that if Mandrake dies, a LOT of people (their employees as well as their users) will be left out in the cold.
-Jim
"Amich"
When Mandrake was selling software they were doing quite well. The software division still turns a good profit. The debts from the e-Learning contracts are what is killing the software.