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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
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? ^_^)
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