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MandrakeSoft Roundup
uninet writes "MandrakeSoft, the French GNU/Linux distributor who filed for bankruptcy protection one year ago last week, announced today that its first fiscal quarter of 2004 resulted in a positive operating result of 280,000. The company also announced Beta 1 of Mandrake Linux 10.0 today." Additionally, tkittel writes that "Mandrake has just announced on their club pages that they will release an updated version of their 9.2 ISO's (but just for club members). This is due to popular request after the numerous updates after the initial release." OSDN's own Robin Miller had a chance to talk with MandrakeSoft's CEO and learn more about the company's future plans.
This isn't meant as a flame, I wish Mandrake well.
But how much of their income last quarter was due to donations, and do they expect to be able to keep that up? I really don't know, and I'd like to hear from soemone in the know.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
Boring version numbering. Apple decided to go X... what's up with that? There's Mac OS 9, then Mac OS X 10.0. Latest is Mac OS X 10.3 - using both X and 10 seems repetitive. RedHat went from 9 to changing their name to Fedora Core 1, effectively starting over. It seems to sound better with version numbers 10 (or 1-digit).
I ordered Mandrake 9.2 when it came out and cancelled the order 2 weeks later when they didn't deliver it. After 2 months of numerous emails back and forth of emails of "Refund process can take up to ten business days. We have recontacted our financial department about your order." I still have not received a refund.
10.0 beta is often, in Mandrake sense, half a year from release. And don't say that they're only KDE. They're GNOME focused as well, and all their configuration apps are written using Gtk.
As you mentioned, 10.0 will be 2.6-based. I'm using 2.6 with Mandrake Cooker (devel) now, and it works good.
I do agree on your point with 9.2. It wasn't very solid. Even bugs in the installer annoyed me.
Hm, selling an ISO? Sounds hard.
Things are really boding well for the linux desktop. I believe one main obstacle is for people to just know about what all can be done with a standard linux distro since there are so many nifty applications (my experience was with KDE and all little utils such as kdirstat).
Here is one example related to the need for evangelism: I have used latex very much, but only now, after killing some time on the net looking at related stuff, did I find information about "texdoc", a sort of a "browser for tex/latex". When I tried to look at texdoc, I found the shell showing texdoc and texdoctk, texdoctk has a GUI and a sort of a comprehensive reference. If it took me so much time to come across such a useful tidbit, imagine how much time it would take for someone that does not even have much interest in exploring. He/she would be stuck with cryptic menus
BTW, Mandrake's 10.0 beta looks impressive (KDE 3.2Pre Linux 2.6.1 (+2.4.25)), and the bittorrent link is at here
S
SUSE and Mandrake are fighting for the same market. If it comes down to the survival of one I don't see that Mandrake's resources can match those of SUSE.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
People donate to AOL all the time even though AIM is free, Winamp is free, Mozilla is free. Whats your point? Their model is based on subscription revenue not donations. I see nothing wrong with this model if they make money. If Howard Dean can make millions of dollars just by hosting a blog, I don't see why an important Linux company cant stay afloat in non profit fashion.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
I have been an avid Mandrake supporter for years, but the following quote from Roblimo's article has me concerned:
"The "community" version is expected to be the first major Linux distribution that includes the 2.6 kernel. Two or three months later, the "official" version will also incorporate the new kernel.
Bancilhon expects to see updated versions of the "community version" every six months, while the "official" version will be on an 18 month release cycle."
Basically, I take this to be that they will use the community version as a way to beta-test their real distribution. The paying customers get the good stuff, the rest of us deal with the bugs and have to be on a constant upgrade treadmill because security updates will no longer be provided after six months.
Very disturbing, IF this is indeed the case. If this is not the case, I apologize in advance for jumping to conclusions. It also makes you wonder as to whether Mandrake's repositories will now be fragmented between community and official, which will require much more man power to maintain and thus reducing the number of packages available.
Finally, six months is not nearly enough time for an operating system to stop being supported. This is just plain ridiculous and IT is exactly the same thing that Red Hat did with Fedora, which at the time I found appalling. Only difference is that Fedora actually has a fedora-legacy project in place that seeks to have longer-maintenance cycles.
What do you folks think? As much as I hate to say this, even 18 months is too short a time for an official distro, which is what you would use on a server.
Servers are only upgraded every 3 to 5 years. I am having a hard time understanding what it is that Mandrake is thinking. In fact, this is looking ever more so like forced upgrades to me.
While some of you may dismiss my comments, Mandrake has been my primary distro for over four years, so I say this with a lot of regret and I hope it spurs enough debate that Mandrake will have to respond to our concerns.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
I had troubles with Mandrake as well. The first install of 9.2 found my modem and worked fairly well
It would not open a terminal in a user account though.
Then a few weeks passed and I thought I would try it again. This time it refused to use my modem. All the other problems seemed to be resolved though.All I have heard was how easy Mandrake was to use the distro for newbies that still had power. Man I still dont know how people got that impression unless the version 8x releases where better.
Oh well I am sticking to Fedora for my main box and Slackware for my backup box.
I am glad the drake is doing good though.
Xine can play Quicktime, but if you need support for the new trailers, you need the Qdesign sound codec, and that requires the win32 quicktime codecs.
But thanks for the link, I'll try that, since it looks very nice. There's a Mandrake RPM for it in the contribs.