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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."
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!)
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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
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.
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)
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?