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

It's one option

[ThoreauHD]

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.

Yeah, let the community have it

[RailGunner]

Hopefully, the community can take over the Mandrake Distro. Mandrake has the reputation of being once of the easiest distros to get up and running, and with KDE 3 it's definately something that could appeal to Mom & Pop AOL'er.

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!

*MandrakeSoft* launched the MDK Foundation idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Mandrakes Business plan is GOOD

[HanzoSan]

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..