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..."

Comments

Donations

[Klerck]

Well, may as well not let all those donations go to waste and put the people who donated (the people who cared) in charge of something. Maybe the people who really care about Mandrake can turn it around?

Debian

[arikb]

There is already a 'community' based distro. If Mandrake is to go down, maybe it's best to combine the effort put into Mandrake into Debian?

I can see the fights over the GNU/Mandrake/Debian (or is it GNU/Debian/Mandrake) name.

Re:Debian

[Chris Canfield]

While I agree that Debian and Mandrake would be an interesting marriage, I hardly think it is an appropriate one. How many years of testing does Debian do before they will put a package into Stable? And Mandrake? Mandrake is an ultra-easy to use distro. Debian is an ultra-easy to administer distro. While I would like to see a lot more bleed between the distros, I seriously doubt the two would survive the honeymoon. Still, an affair might bear fruit.

Re:Debian

[jbolden]

I gather you are a Debian user. The cultures of the distros are really dis-similar. Lets start:

1) Mandrake started as a Redhat + KDE. In many ways Mandrake is the "home" distribution for KDE. Conversely Debian and Redhat are the core supporters of Gnome.

2) Mandrake was one of the first to compile to Pentium; Debian still compiles to 386. Mandrake would naturally after the 2.6 kernel (which is going to require a recompile) probably set up Pentium III required optomized for the Pentium 4.

3) Mandrake tends to be feature rich QA poor. Debian is almost exactly the opposite.

4) Mandrake is RPM based debian is APT based. Though Mandrake isn't religious about this. However one of the key tools unique to Mandrake is an application control center which would be worthless with RPM.

5) Mandrake has never concerned itself with producing a similar feel on multiple platforms. The PPC version of Mandrake was designed for PPC users and had features not present in the x86 version that would be important for PPC customers (Wine sort of thing for MacOS, netatalk installed be default...). Debian conversely wants the distribution to be very close on all platforms. While not quite as extreme as NetBSD they certainly don't see the PPC version of Debian as a seperate but related product from the x86 version of Debian. In general they won't include software that doesn't work on multiple platforms.

Probably the best thing would be for Debian Desktop to just grab the Mandrake Wizards and use them. Perhaps they might want to consider Mandrake's automatic security level scripts. That's the only contributions I can see Mandrake making to Debian that they would want. In the other direction I think RedHat not Debian remains the best place for Mandrake to get support.

Re:Mandrake's Demise

[Fnkmaster]

Though you resemble a troll in certain respects, I'm inclined to think you have some decent points (in fact, your insight into the mid-level management mindset leads me to believe you either are one yourself or have had an inordinate amount of experience with the most small-minded from that set).

MandrakeSoft has perhaps taken too strong of a position spouting off about Free-this, Free-that. You and I here on Slashdot understand that Linux is about Free Software (or Open Source, depending on which idealogical leaning you have, pro-RMS or anti-RMS). Freedom is important, Freedom is worthwhile. However, Freedom is not the same as Marketing. Selling a product is about Marketing. As I've stated before, I think MandrakeSoft would be much better off if they started charging for ISOs (or rather, making ISOs available only to MandrakeClub members), and starting focusing on marketing to businesses and home users, and spit-shining their product (get their fucking QA people in line for god's sake, and use your brain before you stamp a release as ready-to-go). If somebody in the community wants to put together a FreeDrake ISO with MandrakeSoft RPMS, let em. Hell, they could do that now, and put some spit-shine on the stuff. But they don't. People use Mandrake, and like it. They need to start capitalizing on their popularity among geeks who want a desktop Linux distro that Just Works (newbies and others), and broaden their damned market appeal and start selling some shit. If they don't, somebody else will. And my fear is that it will be Lindows or somebody equally smarmy. Ugh.

The problem, as I see it...

[Squidgee]

is that, while this would push Mandrake into rapid developement, it would most likely lose sight of its user-friendly goals, and move toward the road of Slack or Debian (Both extremely good, but complicated).

IMHO, if Mandrake is to become as user-friendly as it hopes, Mandrake needs a contingint of professional coders/GUI designers. If it becomes non-profit, Mandrake will only be coded by hackers.

Not to look down on hackers; I'm one myself, but I'm making a serious effort to move my programs toward user-friendliness and performance. But hackers will not make a user-friendly OS with a good GUI; they will make a hugely powerful OS with a ugly, horribly unintuitive interface, and complete user-hostility. Mind you, this isn't a bad thing; for things like servers, no problem. But Mandrake is aimed for the desktop, and that will just not do.

I'd hate to see Mandrake go, as it had a great goal. But I fear if it goes this route, it will fade into the sunset, a lot like Slack sadly has.

The community already * has* Mandrake!

[aquarian]

It's open source, isn't it? At least as far as I can tell -- the only things that aren't free/OSS are the third party apps included with the pay-for product. The basic distribution, and the neat Mandrake installer and admin tools that make Mandrake Mandrake are all free/OSS. Correct me if I'm wrong...

Does anyone actually read anymore

[woogieoogieboogie]

Equivilent of US chapter 11

Mandrake is not going out of business, they are seeking protection from their creditors and will reorganize their business model. Bankruptcy allows a good business to overcome a mistake which would normally destroy the company. Selling enhancements to a free product is a good business model and one which can be highly profitable. The core of Mandrake is solid, it is the other avenues Mandrakesoft took to increase revenues which have faltered.

Looking at Mandrakesoft's investors, Vivendi is a major investor in the company and has deep pockets. Why do you think a relatively obscure French company can get highly visible and valuable shelf space at US stores like CompUSA.

I find the "Mandrake is for newbies" comments on Slashdot worse FUD than anything Microsoft puts out. Mandrake is a Linux distro and can be as easy or as difficult as on wants to make it. Nobody has to use or even install the the usability features of Mandrake and experienced users can do an expert text based install and create EXACTLY the system they want. This is not to mention that ease of use != newbie. Many highly experienced users prefer the simplicity which Mandrake offers knwoing that underneath it is Linux and can be adminstered either through the convenient supplied interface or via the command line ro by directly editing the configuration files.. Once you have gotten past the NEWBIE stage of impressing yourself with Linux, you realize it is just another OS spending hours configuring a machine is a waste fo time since that time could be spent actually doing something productive with the system.