Slashdot Mirror
Mandrake Linux 9.2, Adware Version
thedarb writes "Mandrake has decided to sell ads to be seen during installation, web browsing and in screen savers. This all comes in their upcoming 9.2 release. Seven G's and you could put your face in their installer." Update: 09/12 18:07 GMT by M : Mandrake has a page about the ads.
Now, if I can't modify it to remove the adverts, and re-upload this version under a new name, that's a different issue.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
Niiice.... I used to like Mandrake. Good thing I recently discovered SuSE. Guys, if you're looking to become an ex-Mandrake user after this, SuSE rocks. Mandrake's coolness is in its easy configuration, and YaST has that covered.
They think this is gonna help keep the doors open, but I think they just drove the last nail into their own coffin.
will have "updates" available I'm sure.
:-P
Ads in the installer, I'll abide that. But the webbrowser?
that being said, I don't run Mandrake anymore. Maybe with version 10, who knows.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
It's unfortunate it's coming to this, I wonder if they could have done something different in the beginning; not grown too fast or something. They started very strong, I even used Mdk for some time back in the early days, but grew tired of the constant "why aren't you a member?" attitude of Deno. Now it looks like they want to take over your screensaver, browser homepage, etc in the name of revenue. This feels much like Opera, which always struck me as some strange marriage of freedom and commercialism. Of course the irony is when I left Mdk for Slackware, I actually started buying Slack distro cds, not because I was shamed into it, but just because it felt 'right'.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
Why are we all assuming this announcement is real. This was simply a posting by an anonymous coward in a discussion group.
How will it look to the average customer if free software has to resort to ads to make it profitable?
I worry that this will make free software seem like a less viable alternative to more expensive products.
Yep, and the cost of advertising on the uniforms will be a function of the company's stock price. I fucking hate what this country is becoming. There need to be limits on advertising. It's ruining the country and the world.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
I don't see a problem with this as long as the ads only pop up during the install, and don't wait for you to hit enter before proceeding.
I don't see it as any more annoying than the "Windows will make everything you do more fun" message that they used to put on the Windows install. Actually, that message always cracked me up, so I can't really count it as annoying.
If they start taking money to install a folder on the desktop full of "special offers from our partners" then it might cross a line.
Pricing
:
Advertising:
- Installation advertising (for every Mandrake Linux 9.2 version) + bookmarks (for every Mandrake Linux 9.2 version): $ 7,000
- Screen saver advertising (only for the 9.2 download version): $ 10,000
- Installation advertising + bookmarks + screen saver advertising: $ 15,000
Browser Default Page
A single message appears for two months (from October 10th to December 10th): $ 7,500
Three different messages (or a single one) appear for 6 months and change every two months (from October 10th to December 10th, December 10th to February 10th and February 10th to April 10th): $ 15,000
Installation advertising + bookmarks + screen saver advertising (download version only) + 6 months visibility on default page: $ 24,000
Makes me wonder how difficult it would be to remove all the adware for a Linux expert ??
While I feel this is the wrong move, why can't they have it both ways?
Dell/HP/Everyoneelseitseems sells you a PC that includes preloaded "sales" material such as AOL/MSN.
Will it cut back on their "boxed" sales? Prob so, but thats their call
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
basically, there are only two revenue models in this world:
all of the linux distros have been trying 1 for a while: charge for box sets, charge for enterprise support, charge for the added update stuff. a good plan, but redhat pretty much owns the enterprise market. and that's where the money is. so it was really only a matter of time until someone came along with model 2.
you should all remember that the reason for this switch is that plan 1 hasn't been working for mandrake. transaltion: you haven't been buynig box sets and tee shirts.
2 1337 4 u!
Or, maybe donate money to Mandrake in the form of a purchase, and keep it free of ads...Mandrake is a company, and is in business to (hopefully) make money. I like that I can get a distro for no out-of-pocket cost, but I won't begrudge them charging money for putting it together *or* finding a way to make money from an otherwise profitless downloadable version.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
I'd suspect that this is less about advertising revenue and more about keeping ppl who don't subscribe from downloading Mandrake from their servers.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
duh...this isn't like website advertising. I'm not saying it's terribly effective, but if Mandrake can convince people that these will/could work then it's $$$ for them...and they need it badly.
The only ones that conceivably would be difficult to remove later would be the install ones. It's trivial to redo your bookmarks (I import a file anyways whenever i set up a system, so that becomes a nonissue) and it will probably take about fifteen minutes for some kindly mandrake user to put togehter an rpm that replaces the screensaver (uninstall screensaver, install new rpm). If Mandrake was really diabolical I suppose they could make efforts to detect this sort of behavior and disable things, but i think that would be too much trouble...
They just want people to pay for their product and there's nothing wrong with that. If you go to the store and spend a little money, voila...mandrake without ads...
Esp. since it's hard to put unremovable ads in an open source program, i see no problem with this.
Brian
Jesus H. Christ. Get a life
The installer will have ads. Big deal. Don't look at the screen, go and get a coffee. Or just ignore the ads.
The browser's start page will have an ad. You know how to change the start page don't you?
--
This sig is inoffensive.
I'm going to go out on a limb and be the nay-sayer here.
Since it's a distribution nobody wants, they have to resort to displaying advertisements in order to generate revenue. So that must mean there aren't a lot of people installing Mandrake, and therefore a very small number of eyeballs affixed to those advertisements. So why would anyone want to spend $7000 on one?
This is not a troll, but I'm sure some random Mandrake fan with mod points is going to treat it as one. Mandrake simply doesn't have any significant way to differentiate their distribution anymore, and unlike RH & SusE they don't have a support business to generate the real bucks. The realities of the marketplace are dictating that this company doesn't have what it takes to continue to exist. Perhaps the advertising scheme is a little bit more noble than their previous "give us money as if we were a charity" game, but both seem like desparation moves when you look at them from a business perspective.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
This is a bad example of how to treat your paying customers. As a Mandrake club member I find it quite strange to hear about theses changes from their partner program area of their web page. A little announcement and explanation to their customers would have helped, but it's too late for that, now. The damage is done.
Stopping my anger for a moment, I have to admit that non-club download versions stuffed with advertisement is definitely not unfair.
Back to the previous blood preasure level though, I wonder why I have to deal with advertising as a paying user. Can somebody explain that? That is a hidden increase in the price tag to me.
What next? Back doors so advertizers can see where we surf?
Slippery slope fallacy, I'm afraid. There's a huge difference between showing an advertisment as default homepage/screensaver, and facilitating criminal activities at the cost of your customers.
No need to panic just yet, I think.
All errors in this comment are mine. Corrections are considered a derivative work, and punishable under copyright law.
Windows users seem more prepared to accept this kind of thing (witness the adverts in Messenger, invasive programs like RealOne, lack of pop-up blocking in IE).
I doubt your average Linux distro user (even a Mandrake user) is going to put up with this. Adverts during the install process I could just about stomach; after all, Mandrake has to make money somehow. But a major advantage of using Linux is that no one but you owns your desktop - this removes that advantage.
Since I just signed up for Mandrake Club, I damn well better be able to get a non-ad version. I already gave them way more money than they would get out of advertising to me.
If there'e no ad free version for Club members, I'll probably take a look at LibraNet, I've heard it's pretty incredible.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I don't think this sounds right, I'm not against them making money. However I do feel that if they want to make money off the software perhaps they should concider a comercial only version with their extra features or something along the lines of Red Hat since they are based off that distro really.
I don't mind paying for Mandrake. I've got boxed sets since 6.0. The download version was a great way to show it off and give it out to people. Now I'm a little aprehensive in doing that since it will have advertisements in it come version 9.2.
I feel that company that does Mandrake might be living beyond their means in some regards. Seeing the club and now this really makes me wonder. That really doesn't make me feel good cause it's a good distro and I've enjoyed it. I just feel this is a wrong turn.
I'll also admit my hate for online advertising is playing a major role in my feelings on this. Spam, popups, etc have seriously soured my opinion of ads these days and I know this won't effect me if I buy a copy, but I won't have the same appreciation for Mandrake as did before I heard this.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Well, that's you. Plenty love their giant Nike swoosh on their hat and A&C shirt and pants.
OT, the Intel Inside P4 stickers are a "steal me" sign for burglars. The last company I worked for had me put together a handful of higher-end PC's for the engineering folks - not major tech but top-of-the-line consumer stuff. They were P3's if I recall correctly.
Anyways, since I'm a little goofy I took all the "P3 Inside!" stickers, and stuck them on a bunch of 286's and dumb terminals for the Sys/36 they had. I stuck them on my phone and whatnot.
One night, the company was burglarized (by the cleaning service, it turned out, but thats neither here nor there). The high end PC's I built were untouched, but the 286s and dumb terminals were taken. Figure a burglar doesnt want to spend more than 5 or 10 minutes in the building, he's got to be selective.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I think it's cool. Mandrake needs the money, and this is the sanest and cleanest way of doing it. I'm a silver member of Mandrake, and even though I download mandrake from the 'net, I'm perfectly fine with this development. BTW RC2 is out, and it rocks!
- the advertising during the install isn't a problem for me. Actually, I'd be interested in seeing which firms are willing to support Mandrake and/or Linux in general.
- Links in the browser: Just change your home page (you were going to do that anyway, right
:-)
- Ads in the screensaver: uninstall the screen saver & install the screen saver from the previous edition, or just reconfigure the screen saver - it's not like it's hard to do "Configuration | KDE | Look and Feel | Screen Saver"
:-)
So, overall, I see it as one way for them to continue to offer us a good distro w/o being overly offensive.Basically the Mandrake distro rocks. (Well at least 8.2 does --hope 9.2 continues that.) People are not paying for Mandrake even though they are getting good value.
If the ads keep Mandrake healthy enough to continue their distribution, but can be changed, who really cares?
If this really bothers you, why not go and buy the boxed set and really help them out.
Mandrake is 100 percent free software. Its a nice mix that is worth something. The way I see it, you can either build your own distro, or support one that you like.
The software may be free, but the work packaging and intergrating it into a distribution is not. We need to pay Mandrake something, or lose Mandrake. Since they are doing fine work, I plan on paying them this time around instead of downloading. --They clearly need more support than they are getting and I get the message.
Keep up the good work guys!
Blogging because I can...
Do you close your eyes and put your fingers in your ears when watching the TV, in case any ads get you?
One word: TiVo.
I haven't actually watched more than 2 seconds of an ad on TV in over a year. I like that.
I'm not the OP, and I agree with the mods that it is insightful to ask how far avoiding ads goes, because it seems we can't escape advertising these days. I'd just like to say that there is so much advertising today, do we really need more?
Over the past decade, my TV watching has slowly dwindled, mostly because of advertising and "product placement".--It's sad when you notice that most of the ads are actually more entertaining than the shows.--First, I didn't renew my cable subscription in 1996, and then, about two years ago, I pretty much stopped watching TV all together. Of course, you can't avoid the TVs that seem to be stuck everywhere these days, like in shop windows, on the sides of buildings, and at the gym. The gym I go to has TVs everywhere and on some of the equipment, too. I don't need those TVs to distract me from my workout. Besides, I'd much rather stare at the blonde wearing the spandex outfit and doing lat pull downs.
I haven't used Mandrake in the past because I never saw a compelling need to try it out when Debian, Red Hat, and Slackware have served my needs well. Someone gave me some Mandrake CDs once and at the time, I intended to try it, but never bothered to install it. Since they're adding adware, I may just skip them entirely in the future.
I know you can just "look away" and reconfigure your browser, but we're already bombarded with advertising every time we turn around. I look at my monitor, and it has the maker's logo on it, there are 2 empty soda cans and a bottle on my desk with the maker's logo on it, ditto for the printer on my desk, the diet notebook on my desk, and nearly everything else in my office. You can hardly walk down the street (or go to the gym) without being accosted by logos on T-shirts, shoes, and people's asses. Why people pay to be a billboard for a company selling cheap, sweat shop-made goods at an outrageous markup is beyond me, but I guess being somebody else's bitch is a fashion statement these days. Sure, you give me a contract like Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan, and I'll get the swoosh tattooed on my forehead, but I'm not gonna pay money to wear a shirt with YOUR logo on it. The only logo shirts that I wear, I either got for free, or I bought to support a free software project or a non-profit cause.
No, I have enough advertising in my life without TV, without AdWare, and without Mandrake. If it's all the same to you, I'll stick with FreeBSD.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Often.
Legitimately.
And, more than "once".
It gets real old, real fast, actually.
See, I work for a three-letter company that makes system on chip components for set-top boxes (as well as more common PC graphics cards). The set-top boxes can include analog and digital television tuners, and we sometimes have to test integrated system functions, like channel changing. We thus have a local feed for this purpose, and one of the channels was, at one time, a soft-core porn channel. I don't know if it still is available. Frankly, I don't care.
Now, if it were my job to monitor this on a regular basis, I'd have the monitor turned away from the hallway along the cubicles, since some might find such content offensive or disturbing. But, the person who's regular job this was had it in full view from outside his cube, and, as far as I know, no one in the mixed-gender environment complained.
It was legitimate work: people watch TV, they channel surf, and some channels contain porn.
You could've hired me.
1) Mandrake always displayed advertising during installation. The only difference now is that instead of Mandrake ads, it'll have other ads.
2) The screensaver use to show slides of Mandrake clipart. Now it'll show slides of ads.
3) They'll add one link to the advertiser's homepage (seen in browser's toolbar and bookmarks).
4) They'll include ads on the browser's default start page.
These changes appear minor and reasonable. If you don't like it: 1) go read a book when installing mandrake, 2) select your favorite screensaver, 3) delete any and all bookmarks to your heart's content, and 4) change the browser's start page.
I'm guessing a lot of users aren't going to go through the trouble of doing even that. It just doesn't seem that instrusive. And if this is adware, then what does that make Netscape? Netscape IMO is far, far more instrusive.
-- Kircle
I think that's a very good idea !
First off, what kind of companies de you think are going to advertise their software in a Linux distro ? Companies that propose Linux products, off course ! And making Linux users aware of their existence is a very good thing. Ever tried to find a CAD program for Linux ? Or some other non computer geek-specific program ?
Second, I don't find their choices intrusive at all. During the installation ? Well, why not ? I am very surprised that this annoys anybody at all.
As bookmarks in the browsers ? AFAIK, virtually every brower comes with a handful of bookmarks when you first start it. And its not like you can't delete the ones you are not interested in.
And what about the screensavers ? Well, I know *loads* of people who browse the web for hours just to download nice-looking screensavers from private companies. So you'll have a few preinstalled, that you can turn off with a few mouse-clics if you don't like them.
If we started to get pop-ups all over the place on the desktop, that would be a different story (I'd be up in arms), but it is really not the case.
Third, making and distributing a Linux distro costs money and this is money that they get and that you don't have to pay. Would you prefer to have to pay for their bandwidth every time you download from their server? They have to pay for it, you know. Or that they stop the downloadable version alltogether? Or that only club-members have access to it ? (BTW, this has been proposed many times. Those who support Mandrake get Mandrake, those who don't find by themselves a way to get it).
Fourth, read the f*** announcement ! The ad-screensavers will be in the download-version only. Which is almost sad, see point 2.
Yes, I pay for my distro, and recommend the DVD-powerpack: you have everything you need on *one* disk, which is incredibly convenient. And their online sales system is maybe not stellar, but it is not that bad either. How many actually had problems with it among those who are criticising it ?
Mandrake is largely worth the price you pay for it. And selling ads is a brilliant idea, at least in the way they plan for 9.2.
Go, Mandrake, go !!!
S. J.
The doesn't mean people still can't bitch or wont bitch. After all, look at the people who bitch about the ads in AIM, all they have to do is go download DeadAIM or a similar product. Look at the people that bitch about pop-ups and pop-under ads, all they have to do is get a popup blocker.
It's the priniciple of the matter that has people pissed.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
And I thought M$ was the enemy... I see now that the Linux community is going to kill itself: Mandrake puts advertising in its product, Red Hat and their infamous BlueCurve theme and short support cycles, etc.
Sad to hear it.
A clever person solves a problem, A wise person avoids it. -Einstein
I share your distaste for advertising.
However: what do you recommend instead of advertising for them? We're talking about the free version of Mandrake here. You don't have to buy the product with your $$$. Instead you 'buy' it with your eyeballs. But if you don't like it, just buy the retail version.
Everyone working on Mandrake deserves to be paid too. They have families to feed, hobbies to support, and children to send to college too. Expecting them to work for free is just plain wrong.
Maybe you don't intend for them to work for free, but that's where complaints like this lead.
As for the advertising on police cars, etc., this is the same issue; just a different flavor. Every time a local referendum in a community for additional taxes to support elevated services fails, they get that much closer to pimping themselves for advertisers in order to pay for services. The alternative is to shut down the service in question or reduce it to an unacceptable (to most people) level..
The commercialization of the world can be crass and annoying, I agree. But the marks or commercialization are the by-product of a world-wide market economy, one that hasn't even matured and reached sustainability yet. Until sustainability is reached, or something better comes along, get used to it.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Definantly!
Do you really think anyone who would read "Linux Today" isn't fully aware of what Microsoft offers? It's not like there's going to be people installing Linux who suddenly see a Microsoft ad and think "Hmmm..Microsoft...never heard of them, maybe I should give them a try instead!"
Similarily, will an ad on Slashdot change the opinions of any of the pro-linux slashdot readers?
If you've even heard of Linux then 10:1 you've used and quite possibly own Microsoft products.