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
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
Cheap UK and US VPS
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
...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
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
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.
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.
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!