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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
Now mandrake move looks a cool idea in storing all the files on the move however what would be even better is a system which boots from a USB device. Now that would be cool
Rus
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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.
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...Slashdot found out and saturated their web site with so many hits that they'll spend the next three years paying for the bandwidth...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Since when is "Chapter 11-like protection" a good business model??
I pretty much only use Debian for linux, but Mandrake is pretty cool. Mainly for how simple it is. It's a distro that I know I could give to most people (largely computer inexperienced) I know if they wanted to play with Linux. The simple installer is as easy as installing a *nix distro gets. Period. It is, in fact, easier than the Windows installer is.
i never knew chmod 755 could do THAT for a company!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Mandrake is a good distro for new users. It is cake to partition, install and use. You don't have to know any command line applications to configure your system. While this may be true for other distros as well, Mandrake does this very well.
Alot of people, including myself, think that mandrake is the closest thing to a desktop linux for the masses currently available.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Have a look at this page;
In November 2001, MandrakeSoft introduced MandrakeClub -- a new concept of offering special services and benefits to Club members which also helps the distribution stay true to the Open Source spirit.
They filed for chapter 11 this year. That means they have been asking for donations through the club for two years before they started having real financial troubles.
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.
Because they just follow the standard path of any software/web business:
B2C -> B2B -> B2Chapter11
Well... MandrakeMove's concept is to offer a liveCD with a USB key that automatically stores configuration data and personal data (email...). That's slightly different... Additionally, MandrakeMove is... a Mandrake :-)
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.
They filed for chapter 11 this year. That means they have been asking for donations through the club for two years before they started having real financial troubles.
That's my point. Simply asking for donations wasn't enough to keep them out of bankruptcy. MandrakeSoft only turned around after telling everyone that they were about to go out of business.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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.
Since when is "Chapter 11-like protection" a good business model??
Since staying in business is better than going out of business, quite a while.
In the early 90s, I worked for a company that filed for Chapter 11 protection while I was on vacation.
"D'ah!" thought I.
Not a terrible thing, really. Debt got restructured (read: our creditors took it in the a**), we got rid of a whole lot of things we didn't really need (read: way too much floorspace (including a no-longer-used manufacturing area)), and got out of a lease on said space, moving to a more appropriate-sized office at a much lower per-foot cost. Then came a couple of years of consecutive positive cash-flow, and *poof* we were out of Chapter 11. Never missed a paycheck, got raises during that time, etc.
No big deal from where I stand.
Would it have been better to have had a better handle on what was going on before it got to the point where Chapter 11 protection was necessary?
You bet.
Was it a handy way of saving the company?
Damn skippy.
In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
-- Yun-Men
The last Mandrake release had a bunch of bugfix updates right after the ISOs went golden requiring the users to download many megabytes of updates. Could this be a result of firing developers? Has anyone seen the lay-offs impacting quality?
I'm quite curious since I use Mdk myself.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
I think that I moved to Mandrake at release 7.2 - RedHat was starting to look too much proprietary to me, something that recent news have confirmed.
Mandrake does include bleeding edge software, but normally it's mostly optional - you can run a real stable server system if you want to with it. I have used Mandrake as both my standard desktop (both in my computer and my wife's notebook). never got any HW detection problems. Recently I bought an USB Ethernet adapter. Just plugged it into wife's notebook USB port, it started to work. No hassles at all. Period.
Also, Mandrake is my Firewall Solution for years now, as Mandrake was the only distribution that allowed me to use my old Performa 6360 as a firewall.
If this is not important to you, or if you suggest me to use NetBSD for PPC instead, forget it. The 6360 has no video/kdb console accessible and so I had to use the serial console directly - which had instability problems and became completed frozen up from hour to hour.
"But you can connect from the network!"
Nope. The network driver couldn't contact my little ethernet network, and locked up the entire machine. And I don't use RealCrap cards in this server, but an ANA-6922TX card.
So, I,ve tried Mandrake as Yellow Dog didn't install; LinuxPPC was fine but had a pretty outdated selection of packages. I'm glad I've done this.
Now, if I just could find one or two 32 MB memory DIMMs for the Performa to replace my two 16 MB DIMMs...
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Fighting the herd since 1985.
If you find yourself looking for Mandrake rpm's all the time, searching forums with the keyword Mandrake often enough, or want to join a productive and growing community, consider joining MandrakeClub.
You are supporting Mandrake (the developers, company, and distribution) through MandrakeClub. There are several benefits that are nice to have (select mirrors, a huge archive of Mandrake rpms, and bittorrents for ISO's) not to mention the fact that you are supporting an operating systems designed with you in mind. There are even forums for different languages. This is a volunteer community by-and-large. No one was forced to come because they found Mandrake preloaded on their computer.
You pay for one year, with 4 levels of subscription. A silver subscription gets you most everything you want for $120/year. Remember, you are not just supporting a corporation. You are supporting a free product (development, patching, documentation, and web hosting) which brings free software that much closer to everyone (including you).
I do not work for Mandrake. Look at the options yourself. And remember Linux and Mandrake are not free because they don't cost anything - they are free because they are supported by people who believe they should be free.
Even better, check out Texstar's work which pre-dates MM;
RPM hell? When was the last time you used mandrake? You do know that you have to configure urpmi so that it can download latest software from mirrors, which by the way can easily be found on this site:
Easy Urpmi
Subscription service is a value added service for club members. There you can get the latest test software and then club members test them before they are released to rest of the public. So get a clue before starting to flame.
What's under yellowstone?
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.
"Imagine the astonishment of the taxman when I try to deduct this as a professional expense." ...and when he realises that you've wasted so much time worrying about the implications of $60, which is probably what you spend per month in fluffy pillows for your tired little head.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
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!
Mandrake's financial troubles actually have little to do with their current business model.
See their explanation here:
www.mandrakelinux.com/en/future.php3
Briefly, after a profitable first year in 1999 as a small distro maker, they let venture capitalists into the capital.
Those investors brought in a new management team which multiplied the workforce by ten almost overnight and steered the company towards e-learning.
The results of this strategy were catastrophic - Mandrake's burn rate reached 1.5M USD/month.
In April 2001, the founders resumed control of the company, refocused on Linux and started repairing the damage.
Filing for chapter 11 was a sound decision in this context, as it gave Mandrake some breathing space to get back on its feet.
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