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Mandrakesoft Profitable in 2004

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the back-in-black dept.

wikinerd writes "Mandrake Linux seems to make good money for Mandrakesoft! According to its financial data it made more than 5 million Euro in revenue with the ending of the 2004 financial year. The financial result for 2004 was close to 1.4 million Euro, while in 2003 it was about -2 million. This means that Mandrakesoft is now back to profitability. Those who are interested enough can read the Mandrakesoft announcement."

24 comments

  1. first post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    omg ive been waiting all day is this what they call an orgasm

  2. Great News by Mark_MF-WN · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is great news. Mandrake is one of the best all-around distributions. Close to the cutting-edge, extremely usable, and a library of packages exceeded only by Debian.

    1. Re:Great News by mattyrobinson69 · · Score: 1

      debian and gentoo

    2. Re:Great News by Mark_MF-WN · · Score: 1

      Gentoo? Yeah freakin' right. The source repository might be more uptodate, but an actual Gentoo installation will always be behind, on account of it taking so long to recompile each update.

    3. Re:Great News by mattyrobinson69 · · Score: 1

      I was refering to the repository itself, and the size of it (gentoo-portage.com) also, it doesn't take all that long to compile stuff, unless your on about big packages like kde, and even then you can use the binary, then update using the source while using the binary version.

      Or, you could even start it compiling before you go to bed.

      Im currently compiling kde 3.4beta, how many distro's could you get kde3.4 beta by just typing a couple of commands on the commandline (or using a nice gui tool if you like - porthole)?

    4. Re:Great News by Mark_MF-WN · · Score: 1

      Of course I'm "on" about big packages. No one cares about vulnerabilities in Tetris or KMines. Vulnerabilities in the core KDE libraries, the Kernel, the core Gnome libraries, in Mozilla, in OpenOffice -- those are a big deal. And if these, the most important applications on your system, are going to be installed from binary packages ANYWAY, what's the point of using Gentoo at all? Who cares if KMines is optimized to the gills?! I couldn't give a fuck if Gaim is optimized for the Athlon XP rather than the Pentium -- processing power is not the bottleneck in Gaim. MPG123 isn't exactly slowing me down -- increasing it's speed by 0.00001% isn't going to help me live my life.

      It's not like I can't compile any program I want in Mandrake. That's what the SRPMs are for, that's what the tarballs are for, that's what CVS is for. None of those take more than three or four commands to get started. With SRPMs, I can get a compilation started in just two commands, and that includes passing in whatever optimisation flags I'm retarded enough to care about.

      My CPU is valuable to me -- given the choice between recompiling my kernel every three days and playing GTA: Vice City, guess what I'll pick? Given the choice between spending all of next week tuning OpenOffice, or spending all of next week not caring because OpenOffice is already fast even on 286, I'll normally pick the latter.

      Besides, no empirical test has ever shown an improvement in Gentoo over distributions like Mandrake. For that matter, Mandrake (optimised for the 586) doesn't even perform measurably better than Fedora (optimised for the 386). And for the most part, applications running on either of those platforms only marginally outperform comparable Java applications, despite Java not being optimized at all for x86 architectures.

      To summarize, source-based distributions are for wanks with too much time. Someone ought to give these people a copy of Netbeans or IDLE and tell them to get busy.

    5. Re:Great News by mattyrobinson69 · · Score: 1

      Its not just about being able to set compiler flags (although that is a nice feature, for example -pipe will speed up compilation times) and there's always ccache.

      Gentoo is about control, being able to compile anything you want, with the exact options you want, with no fuss, it just works.

      Also, just to nitpick, open office wont run on a 286 iirc.

      Also, have you never heard of multitasking, or are you using a 286 yourself?

  3. Mandrake profitable by belmolis · · Score: 1

    I'm glad to hear it. It is a nice distribution. But there's still a way to go. Mandrake's annual revenue is only 0.016% of Microsoft's.

    1. Re:Mandrake profitable by Handbrewer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And that is good. Mandrakes margins are pretty high, a 1.4million profit from 5million revenue is a very very high profit margin. Microsoft has an even higher margin on windows and office, if it were not for their mega failure to profit on all other products they would probably post a 95% profit margin, which can only mean one thing - software is yet to be commoditized enough or too little competititon, i dont see anyother thing in this world except for software hold such an insanely high profit margin.

      But its nice to see atleast one Linux vendor post profits :). I dont know why we clone windows looks in KDE and such, its too uninteresting to clone, we should clone MacOS X instead - Apple just posted 4x rise in earnings. Must be the sexappeal :)

    2. Re:Mandrake profitable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Apple just posted 4x rise in earnings. Must be the sexappeal :)

      comming to a pr0n video near you: "ooooh! fuck me hard! give me your iPod! yeesss!"

    3. Re:Mandrake profitable by GreatBunzinni · · Score: 1

      Mandrake's objective isn't to outperform microsoft (or any other company) in the earnings column. Mandrake's objective is to create a linux distribution which is very solid and so user-friendly that can be considered a realistic alternative to other OSs out there and making a nice pile of euros from it. They are succeeding at it and I hope they keep it up.

      --
      Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
  4. Reinvestment by andy314159pi · · Score: 1

    The question is how much will be reinvested so that this distribution can really compete with Mircosoft. They need to invest in linux "public education" and they need to develop better communication with hardware companies. Maybe then the masses will learn how truly pitiful MS operating systems are.

    1. Re:Reinvestment by Handbrewer · · Score: 1, Insightful

      We should take a good long look at MacOS X - its the ultimate in Operating Systems right now, userfriendly, yet powerful and secure. And its *NIX.

      KDE or Gnome should really be looking good and hard on how they balance things in MacOS X. A bad Windows clone sucks, a bad MacOS X clone would probably still be better, and dont give me that "Well people are used to windows" well thats exactly the reason we should introduce a better design, yet easy to learn. Thats exactly what MacOS X accomplishes, why cant we?.

    2. Re:Reinvestment by g0dsp33d · · Score: 1

      IMHO, they should focus on the things that makes windows popular: (also MHO) compatibility with nearly everything and ease of use.

      My experience with linux (Fedora) although limited, has shown me it places demands on users that windows doesn't. Personally, I enjoy the challenge, but from the average users perspective, the install wizard looks much simpler than
      ./configure
      make
      make install
      I suppose thats probably a bit more of a Linux issue than specifically Mandrakesoft. Still, they probably could optimize it to make the process somewhat simpler.

      --
      lol: You see no door there!
    3. Re:Reinvestment by Mark_MF-WN · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Frankly, I'd prefer that they NOT spend it on public education (ie: advertising). I give Mandrake money now, because most of their profits go into development. If they start wasting their money on campaigns of annoyance, I'll just switch to Debian. It's bad enough they waste the money I give them on investor relations.

    4. Re:Reinvestment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Apple pattents everything

      Apple patents everything

      I think OSS should NOT copy OS X, Apple is well known for suing the pants of the little guy.

    5. Re:Reinvestment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      they probably could optimize it to make the process somewhat simpler

      Not to sound lika an asshat but they did that about 10 years ago with package managers.

    6. Re:Reinvestment by wikinerd · · Score: 1

      If by public education you mean advertising, please consider that Amazon is able to sell books in very low prices because they stopped advertising in TV. Mandrakesoft would better pay for development and new products or services, rather than advertising.

    7. Re:Reinvestment by g0dsp33d · · Score: 1

      RPMs are nice, but they are still a bit of a pain, and users can't interact with them as much as most wondows installers. There are some really nice installers for linux though. I liked the Kdevelop setup.

      --
      lol: You see no door there!
  5. Sweet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    now that they're making money again I can cancel my club membership and go back to using it for FREE.

    Life is... Just fine.

  6. now they should hire more people by Pooh22 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Mandrakesoft is doing fine, but now they are making profit again, they should work on getting more people to both fix big annoying bugs that no volunteer can/wants to handle and also get some people to drag the Club out of the desolate mess it's turned into since Deno left.

    Mandrakesoft should (and probably does) realise the profit was more of a statement to the world than something that shows long-term health.

    If they manage to hire some really good people in the first quarter of 2005, I think Mandrake 11.0 could be really good, but if they don't.... :-(

    All IMHO of course ;-) /Simon

  7. Needs our help by cgenman · · Score: 1

    Mandrake has been a great distro for a long time, being many people's introduction to Linux. So now that they're in their time of need, we should all pitch in and donate to their...

    What was that? You mean you guys are doing ok? Are you sure? 5 Million you say. You didn't accidentally add a zero, did you?

    Ok. I guess Mandrake is doing fine. They don't need us anymore like in the old days. *sniff*

    --
    The ______ Agenda
  8. more coverage by wikinerd · · Score: 1

    If you are interested, I have included a bit more info about this news here.

  9. they already hired some people by imr · · Score: 1

    They did hire a new webmaster in december and he is very responsive. He has been made modifications to the site on the fly right after a request on the forum and he is already working on a rehaul of the site.
    So all and all the situation is already improving on that front.
    He is also responsable for one of the last contracts that mdk won, which is an university research to (kinda) improve the way software are packaged and distributed (so i guess a (kinda) research to improve rpms). So we should get something out of that also.