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Interview with Mandrake's Head Honchos
Shipud writes "Newsforge has an
interview with
MandrakeSoft CEO François Bancilhon, and Mandrakelinux co-founders Jacques Le Marois and Gaël Duval.
Among the issues discussed are a the business model for a GPL-based public company, Mandrakesoft's shares, the role of user subscription in funding, the bankruptcy, Xfree 4.4's new non-GPL license, and more."
...you can hear Francois too if you like :)
It's a good interview
It is an interesting interview, but it was published more than a month ago on may 12th.
/. back then).
(and I think it was also covered on
Kudos to Mandrakesoft for getting out of their bankruptcy situation. They certainly have the possibility of becoming a leader in Linux distributions, since Red Hat has dropped the ball to focus on enterprise linux. Does anyone remember the days when Mandrake was little more than a relabelled RedHat with some slight modifications? I would never have guessed they'd still be around.
France was opposed to the US invasion of Iraq, and since then, they have been declared "unamerican".
I ordered the powerpack cds and it took about 2.5 weeks to deliver to Canada. I'm not sure why it takes so long to hand over a small box of 6 cds to UPS. It only took UPS 3 days to deliver.
...I doubt it...It also takes forever for Mandrake to reply to emails too.
Maybe this is a sign that Linux really is on the rise? Orders that are overloading Mandrake?
Does that mean we need to rename Mandrake to "Freedom Linux"?
Sounds like a good name to me, especially since they lost the court fight to use the name "Mandrake". Seriously. Apparently the syndicate that has the rights to "Mandrake the Magician" took exception, and the French courts agreed. And yes, I use Mandrake . . . or whatever it's going to be called.
Hope they come up with a solid business model and start making real money.
I'm going to have to make a copy of this comment so I don't have to write it yet again the next time this comes up. Mandrake's Linux business has always done well, although I don't know what you mean by "real money". They got into trouble during the dotbomb era when they were saddled with a "world class management" who did what CxOs are supposed to do and looted the company while plunging it into debt. To Mandrake's credit, they've returned to their core Linux business and worked their way back to solvency after tossing the overpaid management overboard. There are a lot of American companies that need to do exactly the same thing.
Fair question. Before I used it I got annoyed by gentoo zealots puffing it like it was the next savior.
So I'll make it easy and explain it. Typing "emerge " downloads the (usually) most current version, all of it's dependencies, and installs it. I've gone crazy playing cat and mouse with compiling packages from scratch to satisfy the dependencies.
I use mandrake and their packages become out of date quickly and it's gets aggrivating. True, gentoo by default compiles everything. You can get binary packages for the big ones so you won't be compiling kde for a few days. The smaller packages don't take that long so it's not a big deal. As for the speed increase, I don't know if it's noticable.
I hope that explains it clearly. I don't like gentoo just because a bunch of nerds on slashdot worship it. I've used it and many other distros and I've come to that conclusion on my own.