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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..."
the best course of action for Mandrake Linux would be a community or non-profit takeover of the Mandrake distribution
It sounds like they're already being run by a non-profit organization...
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?
I can see the fights over the GNU/Mandrake/Debian (or is it GNU/Debian/Mandrake) name.
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.
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.
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.
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