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."

Comments

sc0wned!

[astrokid]

I thought it was funny:

A GPL-based business isn't the easiest model to be successful at; what makes it successful?

FB: A GPL-based business has lots of advantages, such as benefiting from a huge contributor team who help develop and improve our products, and also communicate.

JLM: If you look to the history of Linux distributions, you will see that the fastest growing are the ones which follow the Open Source rules. Most of the proprietary ones have completely failed. Caldera/SCO is a good example.

Pitfall of VC

[wombatmobile]

GD: Besides not having cut costs enough and early enough, I think that the core of the problem was certainly to consider venture cash as revenues, and thus growing the MandrakeSoft structure artificially.

Yes. Worth remembering, that one.

Re:They're french?

[Tarantolato]

Perhaps someone can explain to me the slight or not-so-slight bias against the French in the US I keep hearing about

1. Your language is different[1].
2. Your popular press is as prejudiced against us as ours is against you[2].
3. French foreign policy has a long history of getting in the way of American - I don't just mean the recent stuff either; it goes back at least as far as de Gaulle refusing to endorse the Normandy invasion.
4. American tourists who come back feeling that the French have been rude to them[3].
5. Slightly different economic models, and the feeling on each side that the other's is insane.
6. Historical attraction of American women to foreign men.
7. Blue-assed baboon syndrome: it's easy to hate the losing side in any important struggle.
8. Inheritance from British anti-Americanism.
9. Instinctive dislike of anything that reeks of "high culture".

[1] Easier to dislike people you don't understand.
[2] e.g. frequent use of "cowboy" as an insult. or adulation of Michael Moore coupled with the lack of similarly hyper-harsh criticism of Chirac.
[3] Usually they only go to Paris. Which is a bit like going to New York and then forming judgements about Iowa, New Hampshire and Mississippi based on that.