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Mandrakesoft Acquires Conectiva
rednaxel writes "This morning, both companies issued press releases about the merge. French Mandrakesoft is acquiring all shares of brazilian Conectiva for a total amount of 1.79 million EUR (2.3 million USD) in stock." CNet has coverage of the merger as well. From the article: "This won't elevate us to the status of Red Hat or Novell/SuSE yet, of course, but this is a significant growth for us..."
How do they have the money to do this? Werent they almost bankrupt about a year ago?
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Hrm...sounds familiar...
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Mandrakiva ?
I'm not terribly familiar with Conectiva. What does the Mandrake distribution gain with this merger? Just more experienced developers or did Conectiva have certain features that made it attractive? Or are they just combining forces?
With Suse now an American brand (Novell) I think they might just be the number one European Linux company
A paying troll?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Well Suse isn't European anymore, so I guess Mandrake can somehow claim this "title".
I don't know about Europe, but I thoroughly enjoy Mandrake. I'm wondering what, if any, effect this is going to have on future releases.
I'm biased because Mandrake really got me into the linux field and away from Micro$oft products. And linux has made computing fun to me again, which has not been the case for some years now.
I say, if they are trying to make things a little more uniform with these sorts of mergers(software, releases, security) then yay for them. Let's see how it turns out.
The 2.3 million was only $1.75 in cash. The rest was in a stock swap valued at 2.3 million. Valued by who, I have no idea...
Is it just me or do you think they are going to be the big Linux desktop of the future? I mean Redhat does have the name that everyone knows as linux. However Novell has slowly been buying all the cool linux desktop stuff. They bought Xandros and Suse and those are two huge players in the Linux Desktop market.
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
surrenders to Conectiva and raises a white flag.
Sig it.
MandrakeSoft, why, you could abbreviate that MS. And MS is aquiring companies and getting bigger?
I think I just felt my knee jerk a little bit...
*Runs for the hills*
Being a Mandrake user for several years, I am happy to see that they overcame their financial difficulties and are in a position to expand.
Apart from the botched 9.2 upgrade debacle, they have a distro that I can use for a Linux home network without spending too much time on it. I have four machines running Linux at home, and don't want to spend a lot of time on each configuring it.
They are also familiar and friendly enough for my kids to use it as their only desktop. They get to play their MP3, use FireFox or Konqueror, use Open Office for homework, ...etc.
Moreover, it is also perfectly good as a server for LAMP, Samba, ...etc.
Go Mandrake!
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Can someone explain what is the value of such a potential "title"? Outside of specific american/european attributes in a distro (conversions/formats/whatnot), I don't care for a title. I just want the best possible distro I can get. Afterall, the source to all the damn software packages come from around the world anyways. I hate the notions of "nationality" being attributed to software that's supposed to be free (as in beer, of course).
That depends on how you see it.. they are still based and registered in germany according to their contact page: http://www.suse.com/en/company/suse/contact/
It may not be *THE* path, but it is *A* path..
Its also in vogue these days..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There is no such thing as a "merge" except maybe in investorspeak. One company buys another, that's it.
Speak truth to power.
wow...I did not know that geoff "mandrake" harrison had that kind of cash....wow I should ask him for some money next time
I don't know how a majority share buy actually affects this, but might the exposure to a large, spanish speaking user/developer base be worth anything, even if in a less-than-tangible way?
First thing I see is market. Think South America is interested in cheap software? I'd guess they are.
Exposure, due to the connection, and perhaps a stronger documentation/application translator force. Mandrake (eventually) saves the Connectiva platform with a buyout (or maybe it just doesn't die), offering Mandrake as a 'prosumer' distro through existing channels and Connectiva contact pages - maybe multimedia centric or something, and grabs some of the technology and/or userbase as their own as they grab some people to translate their documentation and desktop.
Mandrake will also retain any devoted Connectiva "customers" and perhaps offer up some parts of their distro as enhancements, and use their experience finding their way out of bankrupcy to help those a hemisphere away to do the same, increasing the worth of their own investment.
What do you think?
From the PR: "Mandrakesoft, founded in 1998, is the internationally recognized number one European Linux company. Mandrakesoft has built its business by designing and delivering user-friendly Linux products to both individuals and businesses, building a user base of more than 4 million users. In its latest fiscal year, Mandrakesoft's revenues reached 5.18 million EUR (6.7 million USD) for a net income of 1.39 million EUR (1.8 million USD)."
Will the resulting Linux distribution use apt-rpm or urpmi?
....if all the two thousand whatever debian based distros decided to combine forces and release a reasonably priced and quite functional product either. There's a variety of smaller ones that have at least a modicum of support, but they are all different and some work with this or that, others not. It's just too fragmented at that level., All of them just slightly different, but none of them that I have seen so far (no idea how many distros there are and make no claims to have tried them all of course) meets the joe non programer non guru consumer taste test. I know I have the "choice" in it, just I don't have a "choice" to get anything that isn't betaware for all practical purposes.
And I don't think this will get any better until a few of the larger vendors put some kind/brand linux on those machines they sell and are as common as xp is on the shelf, or at least *visible* on the shelf. That's when we will start to see a useability "standard" of sorts. It's really up to the box vendors.
What with the Brazilian government wanting to kick MS off all government desktops, the fact that a disproportionate number of distros come from Brazil & it's the 5th most populous country in the world I'd say it's somewhat strategic in nature for Mandrake to do this.
nt
Put down the crack pipe. The "49.7 days" bug you mention was manifested in Windows 95 {49.7 days is about 2**32 milliseconds}. It may also be present in 98 and ME; at any event, it's a rare event indeed for a Windows box to stay up long enough to be affected. I have seen, with my own eyes, Linux boxes with a two-year uptime.
Your ISP probably runs Linux, so why not ask them?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
As if Suse, being based in Germany suddenly don't count anymore now they've been bought by (the American) Novel.
Actually, after this merger, only Red Hat of all the big distro's is still on it's own.
I wonder how long that'll last. Then again, who's left to buy them?
In the US, if all you got for your company is 2.3 million, it's either under 5 people or a failure.
umm..it will reset uptime...but it won't do the crash thing, at least it shouldn't anymore...
Right, the whole -continent- is Huy Brasil. ;-)
Now they can go to some other defenseless place like the Ivory Coast and shoot more unarmed civilians in cold blood. Then criticize the US more for enforcing the UN resolutions that were ignored for a decade or so. Even ignore unanimous international findings that Iraq had WMD's including the ones destroyed just days before the war.
Yup, they are yellow. Hey Germany, take over France again. Absorb them into a new Germany. Nobody will miss them I'm sad to say.
I'm particularly concerned about future releases myself, since my company is all based on Conectiva Linux.
Conectiva has been working on their Conectiva Linux 11 product for some time now. So, I think (hope) at they will go at least that far. After that, it is anyone's guess.
morcego
IBM?
Looking quickly at this story in my RSS reader, I saw "Microsoft acquires Connectiva"....
Can someone explain what is the value of such a potential "title"?
It tells people you're not American. With the current situation in the US with regards to IP legislation, that's worth a bundle.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
it should be Suse rolls into town and Madrakesoft promptly waves white flags welcoming Suse into Paris.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
I have several machines with more than 6 months uptime. I used to have a machine with 2 years uptime when running RedHat 3.0.3 (kernel 1.0.33 ? Something like that).
What is your point, exactly ?
morcego
Considering Conectiva used to have 200+ employees when I used to work there, and it has around 60 now, I don't know how many they can still fire while keeping their doors open.
No idea on the Mandrake side, tho.
morcego
Ehm, no Novell did not acquire Xandros AFAIK. And furthermore, I have some experience with Novell Linux Desktop 9, and personally I think it has been hyped too much by commercial people. I did not find it too stable, it is missing a lot of useful software, and from a technical point of view, does not seem to have real added value to other distro's. Yes, there should be the support, but I have good experience with the community support from a distro as Mandrakelinux, and at least behind the first line support, for a lot of things Novell also depends from the community for fixing bugs, so I'm not sure it is really an advantage.
I'm happily staying with Mandrakelinux, and as Connectiva also seems a nice distro with some good developers, I am happy to hear the news. I'm confident these two companies won't become a commercial giant like Novell, but the merger will certainly give them some more visibility and credibility in businesses.
Acquisitions and mergers HAVE worked for Microsoft.
So...what the fuck? You guys are "disagreeing" with me by re-iterating and expanding upon the point I made? Mandrakesoft apparently thinks this "corporate strategy" is the way to go, a strategy employed by many successful companies such as Microsoft. Microsoft, as far as I know, has the biggest cash reserve of any company. So yeah. It worked for Microsoft. Thanks.
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More homework next time. More homework....
My bad. Myself, and others I'm sure, appreciate your reply. Thank you for clearing me up and not letting my uninformed dialog go read by others unchecked.
I've heard nothing but good things about the distribution.
Do you think the purchase is healthy for Connectiva and/or Mandrake?
I just got some confirmation from Conectiva that they will be merging their products, even before the next release of Conectiva Linux (11).
From that, one can imagine they will start merging their linux distributions almost imediately.
morcego
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Sure, I thought of IBM too, but IBM never really bets on one horse. This is why they're happy to offer both Suse and Red Hat on their servers.
I'm surprised to hear about this because I, too, thought Mandrake was knocked out. They were going through some financial troubles awhile back--this has already been mentioned. At the time, I was using Mandrake 9.2 and was having a good time of it. Outside of butchering the apache configuration as a learning experience, it's administrative tools took care of everything.
I guess a distro is only as good as the hard disk it sits on, and I discovered it was on a DeskStar . . . when it died. I put an install of Mandrake 10 on drive it was RMA'd and returned. This didn't seem to be a very mature OS. I couldn't choose what to install, and later found out it didn't include gcc. I installed that only to find it couldn't successfully compile anything! I've since switched to SuSE at home bceause that's what we use at work. While that had its own problems, most of it would have to be blamed on my home CD-burner dying (bad luck lately).
I hear there's a community edition ISO along with something else. Whatever I got might have been the junkier of the two. Either way, it left a very sour impression. I'm surprised they're still conducting business, but the best of luck to them.
No I'm not trolling.
Anyone that still believes it is about buying and selling code is compltetely deluded.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The revenue and the earnins should give you a clue at how good they are making money.
A company investing 1000000 and arning 900000 is crap (putting all this out of any context).
Another one investing 10000 and making 20000 is much more profitable.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Why o why people keep asking the same stupid question?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
among other things, they don't think anyone would actually use "IBM's Linux" because of image issues. They want to make money from support anyways, it works well to be distro-neutral.
once you go slack, you never go back
Thats a misconception, not every Linux developed app is Free or Open Sourced. There are many closed liscence/Proprietary Liscenced applications. Dont be so asinine as to make such a broad statement as
"All software that comes on every distro is free"
Thats a large idiot speaking. If you ever want to legitimize the business you have to follow certain business level practices to be successful. While open sourcing is good, ultimately in the end, someone has to pay out the cash to support it. Why is RedHat so successful and still able to make money. Otherwise why would they charge you 2500$ for RH Enterprise AS.
Take your beans, and while your at it, Tell Redhat, Novell, Mandrake, Lycoris, Linare, Libranet, Xandros, and those other Dists that are actually trying to market themselves to make money to take their products off the shelf because its useless to sell something thats free.
Go home 12yo......come back grasshoppa when you have learned something.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
Well, i have Mandrake Community 10.1 installed on my linux box (my notebook) and i always heard good things about Conectiva and its developers. Since i'm also brazilian, i feel very greatful with the fusion ... i think some good products can be build now on with this merge. Also Brazil has a strong movement to the open source software and the open source initiative and also has a great potential to grow too ...
WHY did they buy SuSE?! It was a strategic aquisition that rescued Novell from obscurity. From hardly being mentioned at all, Novell now gets A LOT of media attention.That alone was worth the price - now suddenly they have an audience when they talk about their identity management and enterprise management software. They are perceived as being the most interesting Linux company - precisely because they have a great software stack that can be combined with Linux. Also, when they bought SuSE they didn't just buy Linux. They got a company with engineers and skills. With a brand name. You didn't think all that was downloadable from the net, did you?
I have to aggree with hunger on this issue. Its common sense.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
YUM is written in Python as are Fedora's Fedora-centric tools and installer, so that makes sense. Urpmi is written in Perl as are Madrakre's installer and tools, so that makes sense as well. Apt for RPM is still a hack of the code written for .deb's, Synaptic is just a GUI interface for APT like rpmdrake is a GUI interface for urpmi. There are valid reasons for all of them existing. They all have pretty much the same features and do pretty much the same thing.
The important thing is to standardise the server index files so that apt, urpmi, and yum can all access the same software repositories, a boon to non-distro-specific software developers. Then, if the distros can standardise their file directory structures . . . Well, too much to hope for, I suppose with SuSE's unique approach.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
ROFL !1!!1!
They then turn to Red hat for help and Red Hat answer is
Sorry its not our problem its europe problem we will join when the war is actually won and that whe can claim to have done the job all by ourself
I am a REAL American from Canada , not a wanna-be from the country , self called "last remaining superpower" "of America
There is a nasty bug in Linux that makes the computer reboot every 49.7 days.
wtf... Nothing special, just a machine I am logged into right now.
# uname -m -r -s -p
Linux 2.4.27 i686 unknown
# uptime
4:25pm up 104 days, 16:25, 7 users, load average: 0.15, 0.44, 0.72
welcome our new cheese-eating, samba-dancing, stinky overlords
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Debian; I never managed to get the ATI drivers to play nice with my card (and this wasn't for lack of trying)
Fedora didn't want to give me sound, nor did it give my laptop power-savings.
Suse I never tried, and compiling/Gentoo is out of the question.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
First the slashdot editor repeat the same story a few weeks later, then the second day, and now on the SAME f*cking day... I wonder if next time they are going to repeat the store the next hour
Yeah, but this chart makes things look much more crisp and clear.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
"(Compare that to other operating-systems, where if you so much as change a hard-drive, you have to beg for permission to continue using the OS)"
You mean like I had to do with W2K when I replaced the MB, processor, Ram, and power supply?*
*Take note companies don't have to either.
use Linux only to boot into illegal copies of Windows
Pray tell, how do I do that?
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Actually, only 51% of their revenue comes from sales, the rest is consulting/support.
France was right about the WMDs. US was wrong. Now the French are 'whiny pussies'? Besides I haven't noticed France/Mandrake having an image problem outside of the United States.