Slashdot Mirror
MandrakeSoft Improves Financial Health
joestar writes "MandrakeSoft's latest financial results have been posted to their website. Despite a slight decrease in revenues - mostly due to the dollar/euro rate and negative effects of the Chapter 11-like protection - first results seem impressive: "the company reduced operational expenses by a factor of 5, increased gross margins by a factor of 5 and reduced its losses by a factor of 7". As a result, MandrakeSoft has been cash-flow positive since January 2003, and expects its first positive result for the current quarter! Along with latest Mandrake Linux cool products, these are excellent news in my opinion because it shows that an appropriate business model can help Linux companies greatly."
It's good to see a company that makes a fine product doing well. See, Darl? Money CAN be made from selling software.
"...if you don't like your job, you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed..." -Homer
I'm glad that mandrake is able to make a bit of a profit while still providing a free download edition; without going the redhat way of dropping the home user line entirely. Hopefully other linux companies will see that the Redhat way is not the only way to profitability.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
I for one am a big fan of mandrake and I'll probably subscribe to the MandrakeClub support once my 9.2 discs arrive. I can't wait!
Since when is "Chapter 11-like protection" a good business model??
Advertising is a legitimate business model-- it's an annoying one, but nobody can question their right to do so if they choose. As for going under, it doesn't look like they are NOW.
The CD-ROMs thing.. well, blame LG for producing a drive that CLEARLY violates the specifications and reuses a nondestructive command for a destructive firmware command.
You can point to the earlier stuff all you like-- perhaps only the ONE is still valid though-- but the CD-ROM thing you can't point to Mandrake on.
You might as well go back to the tried and true
- Sell free software
- ???
- Profit!!1!
That's about a valid "business model" as any.I don't want to see them go out of business - that's no skin off my ass, really. But to wax poetic about how "this proves that Linux companies can make money" is stupid. RedHat - now there's a business model.
The only reason Mandrake was "begging" was due to errors made by the FORMER bosses making massive screwups like trying to push Mandrake into "E-Learning". It has NOTHING to do with a flaw in their business model.
Even better, check out Texstar's work which pre-dates MM;
I took my first serious foray into Linux about a year age with MDK9.0 on it's reputation as a 'newbie' distro. It has a LARGE and friendly user base and that (IMHO) must be taken into consideration when you are getting into Linux
Let's face it. People who are trying to learn Linux are going to run into difficulty at some point, period. Sometimes people need to ask simple questions that would get scornful "RTFM n00b!" replies on any other group, but someone in an MDK forum will at least point you in the right direction without ripping your head off.
Linux requires you to know stuff about your OS, and part of the learning curve is learning *how* to help yourself. Snooty attitudes from ubergurus are about as counterproductive as can be.
alt.os.linux.mandrake is an AMAZING resource. Some issues are distro specific and because the MDK user base is so large, chances are someone else had already had that problem and someone else has offered a solution. As a resource for troubleshooting, having access to a large friendly newsgroup (which is fully archived by groups.google.com to boot) that uses your specific distro cannot be understimated.
Now that MDK is the only commercial distro that 1) targets ease of use for the consumer desktop 2) has a significant sized friendly community and 3) allows full ISO downloads for free*, it's a no brainer for anyone wanting to get into linux
*it obviously costs them money to develop or distribute it. Feel free to download the ISOs to try it out, but consider supporting them by buying a retail pack or syearly subscription if you continue to use it.
Red Hat have handed Mandrake the desktop baton. The failure of US Justice department to get anywhere near solving the antitrust issues with current desktops pretty well spoiled the opportunity for Linux desktops in the US. Maybe Lindows will fight the defence on behalf of the US consumer.
Mandrake is delivering on the financials. Now lets see what the EU Commission on competition does on helping to create a level playing field. Will the rights of consumers prevail ? Munich is an important proving ground but expect some serious payola to flow to stop other cities. Whats 40 Billion USD work out to be in Euros now ?.
Not to rain on the parade but please notice that this is a Mandrake company web page with some pretty graphs and just a handfull of numbers. Dunno about you, but I prefer to see official financial filings with an auditor's stamp of approval. Even just a regular cash flow statement and a balance sheet would be nice.
It is the case for many mainstream distros. Suse had even updates (more than 50Mb) BEFORE it was released.
Moreover, more than half of updates were not bugs, but security updates for securing flaws discovered after the freeze. Thus they just did their job.
I'm very hopeful that Mandrake will survive. In addition to being a really nice distro for many years, we need diversity, so I want SuSE (Novell), RH, Mandrake, Debian, the *BSD's, Apple and many more to thrive. At the risk of being modded (is that a word?) to hell, I even want MS to survive long term, since MS's misbehaviours are a big driver for the tons of good work being done in the open source and free software arena, as well as some of the better attitudes in traditional companies like IBM, Sun and Apple.
Only a wide open and long term competition of approaches, value systems and individual people ensures positive progress and yes: freedom!
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
well thats business...
would you rather have had that company go out of business, and you still dont get paid.,
see if they go bankrupt and dissolve the company, thats it , its overe you dont get money either.
atleast with the chapter 11 a lot of the creditors will
I'm looking at Mandrake's two-page year-end "Newsletter to Investors" and I can qualtitatively say that there's no way one could definitively say their financial health is improving.
/. readers to know that accounting and investing or disgustingly complex topics, and most shareholders don't read the annual reports or know enough to make sense of the number and subsequently get caught up in the bandwagon without a further analysis. It's very easy to lose your money in this market simply by not looking at the books.
I'm not sure if it's just rigorous US accounting standards have kept me from the harsh realities of international investing, but I have no idea about Mandrake's debt position, their return on investment, where exactly they're generating cash flow (operating, investing, or financing activities--they're very different) and about fifty other such ratios and line-items and on average fifteen pages of notes that are given for you or very easy to figure out on companies that follow U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).
Compare the annual report of any publically traded U.S. company (here's Intel's annual 2002 report--the PDF is 102 pages) and you'll notice that a lot more information is given to investors and shareholders. We have, off the top of my head, the usual letter to shareholders from the CEO, some "PR fluff", the balance sheet, income statement, statement of cash flows, notes to consolidated financial statements, a signed auditors report indicating you can actually trust the data, segmental data, and thorough management discussion and analysis (MD&A) in which the company's head honchos actually talk about their company's financial health.
I'm not dissing MandrakeSoft in any way, I think their software is top-notch and with the disappearance of Red Hat from the consumer line I think Mandrake has a critical role.
I think it's important for
Mandrake, for example, could be earning all their money from external financing and losing money from operations. That looks good on your income statement but if you don't check the statement of cash flows, you wouldn't know about that and you'd bee royally screwed when those external lenders come to collect. Plus, all I know about their debt situation is that they're in chapter 11--how much debt do they really have? I could think of a hundred other questions not answered by their newsletter.
Mandrake's "newsletter" does not give me the numbers I need to make that sound analysis.
Oh, and before some of you wiseguys respond to this, realise that Enron, et al. are the EXCEPTIONS, not the rules.
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
Mandrake also seems to have a strong "get it out the door" drive. For what it's worth, I'd rather have it ship with a few bugs (I didn't even notice any of the scary bugs on the original 9.2 CD) as long as they release in a timely fashion, then fix it within 2 weeks (as seems to be standard practice with Mandrake) Perhaps it would be better to have a release strategy to reflect this, though, so as to only release the fixed version for the packaged CD's (like the fixed release to deal with LG drives this time around)