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MandrakeSoft Exits Bankruptcy
joestar writes "It's official now: the Court has approved Mandrakesoft's exit plan from the Chapter 11-like protection status. This seems to be the result of the recently announced profitability of the company, and means that Mandrakesoft is now fully back to normal activities. Great news for the Open Source community and Mandrake Linux users! All details are available in an online PR."
I don't think Mandrake is anywhere near as good as SUSE, but wouldn't like to see them go down.
Mandrake was my first taste of Linux and I'm glad to have learned much from them and their community. I hope these guys stick around - while Slack/Debian/Gentoo/etc. are great, it's always important to have distros like this available to those interested in making the switch. I haven't paid them anything since 2002 - maybe I need to throw them some bucks in gratitude. Seems a far better option than the windows tax (pirates be exempt from this doubloon taxation, me knows. arrr!)
I also reply below your current threshold.
This is great. As a complete noob to Linux (GUI only person), Mandrake is/was the easiest to set up and use... and it works flawlessly. Keep up the good work Mandrake!
This is most excellent news. I think that with French administrations (esp education, research and military) moving towards Linux, Mandrake might be able to secure a few core customers on their home ground.
Most of all, it's encouraging and a releif for all the contributors - Mandrake has a great record of quality tools given back to the community.
Atheism is a non-prophet organisation
Great news from Paris, and to celebrate, I'll continue doing what I've been doing for quite a while:
Recommending Mandrake to all my friends (who usually download it) and to all the companies I consult for (who usually get powerpacks).
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
I don't want SCO to be protected by chapter eleven. I want to see them down, see their stock price below the 2 digits (I'm talking about cents here), see them being bought by somebody else who will take all their assets and sell them to the best bidder. Then I want to see Darl being sued by former SCO stockholders and thrown in Jail.
I don't want to see being protected by Chapter 11. I want to see it burn.
Couldn't resist the AC/DC reference, sorry.
Mandrakesoft seems to have plugged its way back up to profitability and that's extremely commendable. There have been a lot of people who wish for that "One Distro To Rule Them All" and a great deal of those people were going to crown RedHat king. I was one of them.
However, I've changed my tune in the last few days or so. Mandrake was one of those distros that focused on desktop linux very early on. When folks at RedHat were reluctant to jump on the other side of the server, Mandrake went in, both feet. At the very least, that's commendable.
The sad part of the story is that Mandrake isn't as big as RedHat nor does it have the backing of a Novell the way SuSe does. One can only hope that Mandrake's survival (and profitability) ensures end-users a great desktop distro from all the competition.
Why do people mark these comments flamebait, at least the post is speaking some level of truth.
Thanks for having my back. I'm not trashing Mandrake. I have it on one of my machines and happen to think they are excellent in several UI areas.
But they do REALLY push you send them a check. Here's the link:
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/ftp.php3
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
However, Mandrake is one of the absolute best newbie/intro distros of all time, IMHO, and it's damned good to see them come back from the dead.
I'm curious--what makes something a newbie distro vs. anything else? By virtue of the fact that things Just Work? You don't need to fire up an xterm and remember 311k arcane commands to do common administrative tasks, that there are GUI front ends? That you don't have to build it from scratch (hello, Gentoo)?
If that's the case, call me a newbie.
I wonder, do we see a pattern here? Could this be why Mandrake wound up in "Chapter 11-like protection status?" Could it be an indication that it might again wind up in said status?
It appears that Mandrake is a great distro for newbies (I know, I started with it myself) who then do not stick around (yep, me again). The result is a relatively high cost of sales, and a relatively small continuing income stream. Can a distro survive if it is everybody's first distro, and nobody's second?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
In fact I'm having a bit of trouble with GTK+, it's yelling about lib/cpp failing sanity check. As far as I know it shouldn't even be using that instead of GCC, but whatever...
I've always loved Mandrake. Anyone can complain that Linux isn't user-friendly, but it takes very brilliant people to actually get up and DO something about it. And that's exactly what the Mandrake distro is: Linux as user-friendly as it gets. From the install to the first time you start X, anyone who has even used a computer will feel right at home.
Granted, to get the most out of any Linux distro, it helps to be a propeller-head, but it's great to know that, once installed, you could teach a granny how to use Mandrake for Web/email/office apps.
I'd just like to sum up my thoughts about why you should give Mandrake money in a quote I saw years ago: "Support those that enrich the world, not those that use the world to get rich."
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Can a distro survive if it is everybody's first distro, and nobody's second?
Yes, absolutely. Because it will never be "nobody's second"-- people naturally resist change. If enough people are convinced to switch from Windows and wind up using Mandrake as their desktop-- and it's my opinion that Mandrake is well suited to that task-- then the lower-tier users (ie people who just plain want to use the computer for email, web, etc.) will stay with Mandrake. Hell, we've got people who're resisting the change from Windows 95. When something works, Random User will not risk it by upgrading unless there's a damn good reason. Random Geeks (like us) will always progress to the Next Big Distro, and in the case of Mandrake, it won't be that.
If you want to make a Linux Desktop a reality, make it simple to use and get into. Mandrake gets that pretty close to right. It was my first distro, and I trashed my hard drive twice before I finally got it right; Mandrake's installers made things pretty easy, but not infallible. And besides, how many Random Users are going to worry about installing it more than once?
(Wow, my first Linux-zealot post. How'd I do? ^_^)
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
SOMEbody needs to support them if they're going to be really successful. And that's me ($120 Silver Club Member).
Also, in addition to paying for the club, you get the powerpack for download, and commercial/contrib packages on the mandrakeclub rpm section. (If you're a silver member).
Actually, what really drove me to go from $60 to $120 was the fact that I could download the Mandrake Move! CD with USB Key functionality... Man that thing rocks!
So I figure I'm getting enough out of it to justify the price of $120 for a year... Others may not feel the same way. Others may subscribe to online games... I choose to support Mandrake. Everyone has to make that individual choice, but Mandrake can help people realize that it's important to support Mandrake.
Don't you think they have a right to ask people to support them? Isn't that the whole spirit of the OSS community?
For starters they are not insisting that you use their distro, and last I checked Open Source Software is Free as in speech, not free as in beer. Surely you agree that they deserve to be paid for all the efforts that they put into making such a great distro.
Honestly, I think we should be happy in that they let you try their distro before they ask to be paid. I tried the distro one time, but I decided to go with RH instead, hence I did not buy the club membership, but it was good to know that I did not have to buy a membership to find that out.
If you think this is bad you should see the stunts Real uses when you try to download their free player. This is really really tame in comparison.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
I ordered Mandrake from them in November and after a few weeks of them not shipping, I cancelled the order. They kept on saying they would refund the money, but never did. Then they just stopped replying to my emails. If this is how they are dealing with coming out of Chapter 11, that is a sad way to go.
My definition is a distro suitable for newbies to install and maintain
That sounds like a good definition to me. I would add that this does not mean it's unsuitable for non-newbies. I started off on Slackware, and had good guru friends around to teach me how to write bash scripts and hack at config files in vi, but now that I'm comfortable with that stuff, I just want a Linux that I can work with with a minimum of fuss. That's why I use Mandrake, and if I click some drop-down boxes, and hit Apply, and my X server doesn't boot, well then I'll crack open my XF86Config-4 file and have at it.
I can't think of anything that I did with Slackware that I can't do with Mandrake. In fact, I do more with Mandrake thanks to urpmi (I know, Slackware recently got a comparable package management system, and these are all just poor substitutes for apt-get, but I like it). I want to recommend Linux to my friends, and I can't recommend something that I don't think they can use, and I can't recommend something that I don't use myself. I'm glad to see Mandrake is back on track
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
Mandrake had nearly the same message before, during and now after the bankruptcy filing so what's your point? And before the bankruptcy they used to have these pathetic public pleas in the press for contributions from the community or they would go under. At least now they've figured out how to have a positive cash flow and a profitable business.
I still find this to be an atrocious distribution. Twice burned, thrice shy? Anyway, I personally think their biz plan should have been to sell their installation/partitioning software for all popular distros, say $10 a pop, and give up on the bastardization of RedHat's core work. The rest is a waste now that SUSE and Gentoo are more "complete" and Fedora continues to be the baseline distro.