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Mandrake Linux Development Process Changes
joestar writes "Just found at MandrakeLinux.com: 'MandrakeSoft today announced a major evolution in the way that future Mandrake Linux distributions will be engineered and released. The purpose of this new development process is to provide the highest level of new features, as well as maximizing the quality of new products.' In short: for each release, there will be a 'Community' release, equivalent to a common Mandrake release, with all latest features. Several months later an 'Official' release - based on the 'Community' - will be available. Both of them will be released publicly and supported. The new process will start with the upcoming Mandrake 10.0."
Apparently you can link to an article but not read it. They are filing under the French equivalent of Chapter 11 - Reorg. During the process the company MUST continue to do business because they still have to pay debtors. Otherwise they would have filed the equivalent of Chapter 7 - liquidation.
1) Both Mandrake Linux Community and Mandrake Linux Official versions will be publicly released and supported.
2) Fedora is in fact the same as the Mandrake Cooker project, which started... 5 years ago.
So I'm afraid that *Mandrake* is innovating with this new scheme. Red Hat is just leaving its users alone...
Well, the community version of Mandrake is just an early build of the release. Unlike Red Hat, Mandrake is actually releasing the "official" version for public download, as it's stated "after a short delay, Mandrake Linux 10.0 Official Download Edition will be made available on public FTP mirrors". This is a signficiant difference from Red Hat's business model.
And the great thing about all this is that those who want the bleeding-edge stuff get it, and the others (e.g. newbie, corporate user, etc.) get something that's stable right out of the box. I can see this as being a great way to sort out the bugs before the corporate guys install it and toss it to the side after playing with it for 10 minutes. This way, they get something very stable and usable that could gain widespread use throughout various companies.
How many /. type folx are actually paying for linux distributions these days? I'm not seeking flamebait, but just curious. With distro's like Mandrake, Suse, and Redhat all starting to charge some cash for their production releases, are more people starting to look to alternatives such as Gentoo and Debian? Are others starting to scrap the idea of Linux and move to OSX?
What gets you stoked about Linux? The price tag? Quality? Security? or the fact that it isn't M$.
I'd be willing to pay for a distro like SuSE (or whatever) if I knew that the quality was uber-superb. But even my latest go-round with RedHat 9 has left me fairly unimpressed... Maybe I just love OS X too much?
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