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.

Comments

Moral compass?

[mao che minh]

The real question is: will Mandrake accept all advertisement requests? I hope not - I hope Mandrake excercies a certain degree of moral judgement in their decision making.

I would hate to have to relive those all of those "You can enlarge your penis!!" moments, or once again be haunted by "Britney XXX HOT and young CAUGHT J-Lo action action!!".

Now, that's not to say that I would be apprehensive towards "Jenna" advertisements. Those always bring a smile to my face.

Re:Moral compass?

[7759-60784-1-E]

> I would hate to have to relive those all of those "You can enlarge your penis!!" moments, or once again be haunted by "Britney XXX HOT and young CAUGHT J-Lo action action!!".

Fortunately, none of those will be accepted. This'll leave room for the REALLY good stuff, like offers from Nigerians that'll make us millionaires!

Re:Moral compass?

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

How often do you get to watch pr0n legitimately at work, anyway?

I guess that would depend on if your name is something like Ron Jeremy or not...

:-)

Re:Moral compass?

[smatt-man]

Or worse... Microsoft, where do you want to go today?

Or, I'm sure SCO has 7 large... Have you paid SCO $699 to run this?

Re:Moral compass?

[iceburn]

How often do you get to watch pr0n legitimately at work, anyway?

My guess would be once.

Re:Moral compass?

[garvon]

All of the time.I am sysadmin / programmer
for an internet porn company. Used to joke that it was the only job where you would be reading a news site then quick popup a porn site when the boss was comming to look like you are working.

Re:Moral compass?

[rot26]

I used to work for a company that make kiosks. We had a potential client flying in for a demo one day, and I had set up some sample pages/ads/images for them. Before they arrived, some of the accounting type women from upstairs happened by my area and noticed on the demo system what Kurt Vonnegut referred to as "wide open beaver". Cackling gleefully they ran off to tell everybody who would listen how offended they were, and that I could kiss my ass goodbye. Unfortunately for them, the potential client was a chain of "gentlemen's clubs" in Las Vegas, and my demo was considered not only appropriate, but very well done. Ha. Eplilogue: I was the ultimately the last employee to be laid off, which I guess these days is about as close to success as you can usually expect.

This is do-able...

[grub]

"Seven G's and you could put your face in their installer."

Collectively I'm sure we could scrape together $7K to have the goatse.cx guy in all his glory on this..

Interesting

[Archangel Michael]

However, I can see the many of Slashdot crowd crying over this intrusion of commercialism, but this seems like a reasonable way to try and recoup the costs of developing and distributing Linux products.

This keeps Linux "Free as in Beer" and "Free as in speech" at the same time. And what is wrong with that?

So long as I can change it it's OK

[farnz]

I'm not bothered about this decision at all, so long as there's no effort to prevent me stripping out the adverts; ideally Mandrake will offer a purchased version without them, but I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to cover their costs with advertising.

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.

as supported free software

[fowlerserpent]

I worry that opensource software will become advertiser supported. I don't think its likely though. It is however an excellent revenue stream. It is advertising that keeps media of virtually all types so inexpensive to consume. The best thing is, the software is opensource. We can just remove the ads.

Re:WTF!!

[ultrabot]

One of the reasons I use Linux is to avoid ads and spyware.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look elsewhere during installation.

I was a bit worried about this...

[Future Man 3000]

Until I read in the article that it's just the download version. Hey, it's a better form of revenue generation from free products than spyware, I guess.

There might be other slow-loading free software projects that could benefit from this, too, such as KDE or Mozilla. As long as the ads are for techie/computer stuff that's interesting I'm cool with it.

Re:WTF!!

[aaribaud]

Ads will appear in three places:

• - install: do you install every day?
• - screensaver: install a non-mdk screensaver.
• - browser: reconfigure browser.

You don't even have to bother doing it yourself; just wait for someone to do it all and then rpm -ivh noads-1.0mdk.rpm. Unless it's a .deb, of course. :)

Re:WTF!!

[perly-king-69]

Really. How far does this 'avoiding ads' fetish affect your life?

Do you close your eyes and put your fingers in your ears when watching the TV, in case any ads get you?

Do you choose routes which avoid all billboards?

MDK are in financial trouble, and need to raise funds. This seems to be a perfectly sensible way of doing it/

Re:WTF!!

[alienw]

Come on. Advertising during the frigging install is one thing, spyware is a completely different thing. Don't group the two. I use Mandrake, I like it, I wouldn't mind if they got a few extra bucks. The install is pretty boring, so some ads there would not hurt at all. As for spyware and stuff like that: I know quite a few developers at Mandrake, and they would not tolerate that.

As for Slack: that's a pretty barren distro as compared to Mandrake. Clearly, it does not take as much resources to develop it, since it doesn't have its own graphical installer, nice config tools, etc. They are two different products intended for different audiences.

Oblig SCO comment

[dcocos]

I wonder if SCO will buy an ad to remind people to send in their $699

Mandrake 100% free Software

[phoxix]

In case you didn't know, the 3 disc downloadable edition of mandrake is 100% free software. The guys at mandrake worked very hard to make it so.

I suspect that 9.2 will be 100% free as well. In such an event, "spyware" is simply *NOT* possible on the distro.

As for the ads .... lets just hope MDK comes to its senses :^)

Sunny Dubey

Re:I can't help but think...

[digidave]

Web site ad revenues aren't spotty, they're quite good. Do you think Google is having problems finding advertisers?

The trouble is that any doofus who runs a web site expects that clickthrough banner ads should generate some revenue. Webmasters try to generate revenue from mediocre traffic. You can't do that in any other form of advertising, so I don't see why you should be able to on the web.

The web site I run at work generates about $350,000/year in legitimate ads (Ford, TD Bank, Esso, McDonalds, Government of Canada, etc) and none of that money comes from clickthroughs. We charge appropriately for the size of the audience and because we have good audience demographic information it makes it really easy to sell ads. And no popups!