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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..."
From what I hear, the French version of Bankruptcy pretty much kills the business. Someone correct me if I'm worng, but it bears little resemblance to emergence from bankruptcy that US companies enjoy.
Non-profit does sound like a good idea.
A manager would much rather spend money and get a lot of Microsoft product than try to understand why Linux is free. I don't care what you want to say, the savings are too great. They become confused by this and don't have any interest in Linux because of the price. Now, until "free software" and "Linux" are entirely separated, Linux won't be mainstream. I know this may sound like an awful thing to say but it is true.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
It would be a shame for Mandrake to go the way of the dodo, so I personally hope that members of the community step up and support it.
Personally, I use Mandrake 9. Previously, I was running Red Hat 7.3, and since I didn't like what Red Hat did to KDE (which I prefer to GNOME, though GNOME is definately not without its merits), I decided to give Mandrake a try - and I've been running it since. Other Linux distros would do well to take a look at Mandrake and see how easy they make it to install and set up a Linux box. While not for everybody*, the drakconf utilities can be extremely useful.
*Perl script wizards need not apply!
After using Mandrake for a few releases (6.1 - 9.0) I can honestly say the world won't - or shouldn't - miss it. It maybe nice for the Linux newbie, but even they deserve better quality that Mandrake shipped with. Out of all of those distros, I had 3D support that worked in one - 7.2 I believe. Fonts were always a complete mess. Package names were changed from their defaults (ie RedHat names) for no apparent reseaon. Bleeding edge in some ways, but a little too much bleeding and not enough edge most of the time.
I'd go for that with the desktop freindly branch of Debian with the GPL'd Mandrake toolsets/control panel and the option for more recent packages. That would be pretty slick.
I read that in a recent interview of Mandrake Linux founder Gaël Duval at Ofb.biz:
Interview:
For the future, we are thinking about a "Mandrake Foundation" which would be a non-profit organization that focuses on developing the Mandrake Linux distribution exclusively. It would be financed partly by Club memberships and/or donations and/or by a "Street performer"-like system, and partly by companies that make money with Mandrake products, including MandrakeSoft. We think this approach would be much clearer for everyone to understand, and would also provide a more secure future for the Mandrake Linux distribution. It would also help MandrakeSoft become a more successful and profitable company by cutting most of its development costs.
Unfortunately, that's likely the reason Mandrake got into financial problems in the first place. In my opinion they forgot that old maxim, that "free software" means freedom, not price. They offered for free what anyone could download. Had they sold their product commercially, along with the source code in accordance with the GPL, they would have had more paying customers. In this case, distributing the source code would allow hackers more room to tinker, but the binary cd and installation still would be infinately more useful (and necessary).
I don't understand this business about the GPL not being able to be successful; no one else can make money for your work, 90% of the customers don't want the source, and even if they do a binary copy is still important as well. Consider how much harder it would be to 'pirate' a distribution from it's source than from the binaries.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Lindows is using the same business plan. Thats get subscribers and sell the services.
However, Mandrake screwed up in their budget early on, and ran out of money. IF Mandrake dies all the Mandrake users will be forced to use Lindows or Lycoris.
Honestly, I think Mandrake has the perfect business plan for a Desktop Linux, Mandrake just needs investor support, if a company were willing to give Mandrake 5 million dollars of investment Mandrake would be profitable in a matter of months..
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
> Buy their stock
Hmm... unless Mandrake is selling shares that they own, or doing a follow-on offering, the only people that would benefit from buying their stock would be the existing shareholders (presumably the CEOs and officers that put the business in the position it is in if their stocks weren't widely purchased.
Now, if you meant, buy their warrants, well, that would help Mandrake's creditors if they have already filed for protection. I believe in the French courts (and US Courts) they would be placed into receivership and disbursements would go to creditors before going to fund the existing operation.
In any case, buying their stock probably wouldn't help them much.
I don't think Apple has entered the area of Unix computing so much as they poured millions of dollars down a number of high profile sinkholes (Taligent, Pink, whatever the rest of those cute codename projects they had back in the early nineties that completely failed....) and finally gave up and threw a GUI layer on top of NextOS because that's the best they could do.
Since Redmond is doing such a good job of preventing the Dells, HPs, Gateways from bundling Linux: Maybe Mandrake should partner with a start-up computer maker to sell and support a really good "(Mandrake) Linux on the Desktop" machine and be the first one on the block. Look what a little head start did for M$>
Oh, I get that point.
//e in the 1980s for a hobby. I had my first program sale (an Assembler program) to a magazine before I graduated from college in the mid 1980's.
You are missing my point.
Before I was even a teenager, I was putting together working Heathkit radios (and other kits). I learned to program in high school, back in the 1970's, on a PDP 11. I used to program in Assembler (often hand coded) on an Apple
While I'm sure someone will come in as a troll and think they can be clever by twisting what I say, my point is I have a background of working with technical material -- a background of over 30 years of it.
I tried a test install of Debian on my video workstation. I needed to get the system up and running, get X working, be able to use my USB ramdrive, firewire IO for DV import, get the video IO on my ATI Radeon AIW working, get a CD-RW working, get my DVD player (also the 2nd CD-ROM) working to play NON-CSS DVDs.
After a week, I still could not get X to work with my Radeon card. Even on the Debian mailing list, nobody knew what to do. Not being used to Debian, I hesitated to change from stable to unstable or testing, but I finally did it. The newer version of X worked.
While that, in the long run, was a simple fix, it's just one of the symptoms of what I see as an overall Debian problem. It takes so long for programs to be integrated in the stable branch, hardware that has been out for over 18 months is still unsupported!
As to the CD-RW and DVD, it's true all it takes is links, but there's a problem there, and I'm going to sound quite snotty in saying this (and probably get modded to troll immediately for speaking the truth). I've worked with many programmers, techies, non-techies, and the whole range. The Debian community has a BIG problem of being closed minded. In any distro discussion, there's always got to be a few Debian people who pop up and say, "Hey! Debian is the best." Look at this discussion -- it's happened here.
The problem is, at least in my experience, Debian-ites are so busy being right, they are not interested in listening to other opinions. Whenever I say the install (and post install setup) is impossible unless you're a programmer, I always hear, "But you only have to install it once!" I have never, ever, seen any case, in person, or online, where someone said, Debian has a problem with this, and that's why I don't use it and a Debian person replied, "Hmmmm, you're right. Maybe we should look into it." It's always, "But that's not really a problem. Just do it the way that works for us."
My point: I am doing a LOT of programming and I don't consider myself a professional programmer. I'm just doing what I need to do to run my business. I'm working long hours. I don't have time to fart around with adding links to get my CD-RW working. I don't have time to do a lot of post-install work. I need to put in a CD, go through the prompts, and get the box up and running so I can use it for production. If Debian were the only Linux distro out, I'd use WinXP instead. I know that a lot of Debian-ites and programmers will respond to that with something like, "Let him use WinXP..." followed by comments about incompetents that can't or shouldn't be allowed to use Linux. That attitude is doing more to keep Linux tucked away in server rooms and in a tiny corner of the market than anything M$ could ever do.
I've included more than I planned, but the point is, for those of us who have other things to do and a limited time to spend putting our boxes together so we can actually use them to produce services or products, we can't mess around with trial and error setups or researching problems because 18 month old hardware is not well supported wit ha distro. We need to install and get it working. When we have the time, then we can explore and learn.
The computer, to many of us, is nothing more than a tool. A good craftsman, in any field, needs good and reliable tools, but they also have to be able to focus on their work, not on fixing or setting up their tools.
If/When Debian can fit my needs, and can do it without me having to go through and re-adjust everything AFTER an install, I'll be more than happy to use it (the idea of keeping a system up to date w/ a 1 line nightly cron job is VERY appealing), until then, in its present form, Debian is by programmers and for programmers. Unfortunately, this group of people seems incapable of understand there is more than one way to do anything and that their way may work for them, but may not work at all for others.
Ok, I'll bite the bullet here...
What makes Apple os X slick & cool? After all it's a ppc port of a BSD kernel and apps... it's drivers, it's having the hardware you bought working at it's best without fiddling with it to desperation. So Mandrake, or any distro, could sign NDAs and get the source to those damn drivers (3d accel) and patens (freetype, legally) and release dual licensed boxes. That is, sell the box with GPL only components and access the FTPs with the license number to get the extra you pay for.
Ok, you can do that already for free (beer) but having them work clean and out of the box is what the consumer target would want and pay for.
I would certainly pay for encrypted XFree sessions, alphablended HW accelerated KDE/GNOME themes and not the current hacks that turn performance to ground (very clever... but still hacks).
Infact Desktop Linux efforts are stifled by XFree and it's lack of focus on these key issues (to be fair, they don't have the resources to keep up with the pretending users). Get some X hackers, pay them, build a value-added X; don't embrace & extend a là M$ but place the option for high performance at a price.
Afraid of breaking up the standards and the opennes? Ok, give back the code if you like, but at least lead the innovation and pretend the $$ to get it done!
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan