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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."
They put together a better distro than you complainers do...
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
I'm waiting to hear that SCO has entered bankruptcy.
This is quite significant. Its difficult for some major companies to dig themselves out of bankruptcy (see KMart), but for an open source/linux company to do it... it really proves that open source can survive in a capitalist economy.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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.
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.
No matter what US folks may think of French things, and no matter how disdainful one may be, when it comes to Linux at least, we're all family.
Cheers,
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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!
Zing! This is so very true though. The software might be free... but you can bet your sweet wallet the support is not! (But since when is that news for the software world?)
Mandrakesoft just hired old accountants from Arthur Andersen.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
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
they have debt to pay off for the next 9 YEARS. That is almost as long as Linux has been around. Who knows what it will be like in 9 years since it is so far away in computer time. The french chapter 11 is a lot differnet than filing bankruptcy in America when you just don't have to pay your bills after you are done with it.
Sig: I stole this sig.
I'm glad they survived also. I'm a Gentoo guy through and through...but we all need to help each other out. I donated a few sheckles here and there to Mandrake when they were going through their hardships.
Hey, we all need to stick together, right? Giving back to the community, even if it's in some small way. Every little bit helps.
This is great news.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
An "open sauce comapany" is news to me
Here you go.
Uh, check the wording of the story, then check the wording of your post.
Mandrake is profitable and is coming out of Chapter 11. That means that they're producing enough of what people want in order to stay in business.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Homer Simpson: MMMmmm...open sauce company.
I hope to see more and more features and advantages for club members in the future, to encourage not only nice people who want to say "thank you", but also many other people to join ...
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.
It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: Mandrake is not dying
Yet another crippling bombshell failed to hit the beleaguered Mandrake community when recently The Court confirmed that Mandrake accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all exit plans. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey, which plainly states that Mandrake has gained more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Mandrake isn?t collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by not failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict Mandrake's future. The handwriting is on the wall: Mandrake faces a promising future. In fact, there won't be any failure at all for Mandrake because Mandrake is not dying. Things are looking very good for Mandrake. As many of us are already aware, Mandrake continues to gain market share. Gold ink flows like a river of honey. Mandrake PPC is the most successful of them all, having regained 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
SUSE leader Seibt states that there are a whole lot of users of Mandrake. How many users of Mandarke PPC are there? Let's see. The number of Mandrake versus Mandrake PPC posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about a whole lot/5 = a lot of Mandrake PPC users. Debian/Gentoo posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Mandrake posts. Therefore there are about a few users of Debian/Gentoo. A recent article put Mandrake PPC at about a chunk of the Mandrake market. Therefore there are [beyond here lie dragons / 4i] = [woah, Nelly] Mandrake PPC users.
This is consistent with the number of Mandrake PPC Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, Mandrake PPC didn?t go out of business and wasn?t taken over by Red Hat who sell another fledging OS. Now Red Hat is also prospering, its profits turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Mandrake has steadily inclined in market share. Mandrake is very healthy and its long-term survival prospects are very bright. If Mandrake is to prosper well it will be among large enterprises. Mandrake continues to grow. Nothing short of a miracle could stop it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Mandrake is alive.
Fact: Mandrake is alive
(note : I originally forgot the bloody plain old text option. crap.)
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)
Americans, french, israeli, palestinian are all human people...
We all eat, drink, sleep
We all like children
We all love Women (men/dogs/cats/sheeps...)
Having the same tastes, we could all be friends (Bah...).
Well, there are these that bad bad things called "Hate" and "Politics" that make/made people do awfull things this century and the last one...
Personnaly, I'm french and I love americans (the american girls).
So, you see... The antagonism between france-us isn't so bad.... ^_^
Lakedemon
ps : go go go Mandrake !
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...
As one of my relatives used to always say:
Speak not of what you know not
And it's clear you know not, or know nothing of bankruptcy.
Mandrake was under re-organization bankruptcy. They will be paying all their debts. They had to submit plans for payments at least once (I don't know the system in France), either when declaring, or when exiting -- They could not get out of bankruptcy status without having a plan approved by the court and all their creditors for paying off their creditors.
A large percentage of my clients are bankruptcy and consumer advocacy lawyers. There's a lot more to it than you, in your need to be a smart ass, make it out to be.
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?
With even more positive press, I hope more people decide Mandrake is worth a subscription or two. I used to be a SUSE guy, but Mandrake was my first taste of Linux, and I've at last returned to Mandrake, for a few very important reasons.
It's a great distro because you can get your hands as dirty as you could with Debian, and yet its glossy and friendly enough for a newbie. And that's good for me, because I don't ALWAYS want to pretend I'm running Gentoo. That, and Mandrake doesn't seem to lean so heavily on one desktop environment that they ignore the other. I can use GNOME or KDE (or install XFCE4) and not feel like I'm running in some secondary mode. SUSE was like this with GNOME and RedHat & Debian seems to treat KDE that way.
Mandrake has always been concentrating on desktop use, and has been doing it for years, so I think it's a lot more mature than Lindows (can't speak on Xandros). As soon as I can afford it, I'm purchasing 10.0 Final on DVD. God knows I've been using their distro for long enough.
More proof that people will pay to sustain the things that they believe in. They will pay to keep it alive, even if they can have it for free. Any daily user of a good Linux distribution can see the value in sustaining its maintainers.
Open source is a still a pretty new concept to many. I think that it was just a matter of time before traditional "brick and mortar" rules stopped applying. It took some time, but the system is starting to catch on. You don't need to go to the store to support your favorite Linux distro. Mandrake club and online payment systems have proven that.