Slashdot Mirror
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..."
It's a stock swap. No money is involved. This is typical of how mergers often work. The companies agree to merge, and they agree what the company being acquired is worth, do some math, and convert the shares of the acquired company into shares of the new company. The math is much like doing a stock split, though the ratio usually involves a number of decimal points. (The accounting for the investors is also much like a stock split.)
The real question in this case is why is Mandrakesoft's stock worth enough for Conectiva investors to consider this to be a worthwhile deal (as opposed to grabbing on to a sinking ship). I haven't looked at the business side of either company, so I can't comment there.
Big surprise for you: Almost all larger companies have mergers and aquisitions as part of their growth strategies, some in some periods of their existence even as a sole means of growth. This is neither a secret nor limited to MS.
Brazil's government announced earlier this year it was planning to switch 300,000 PCs from Windows to Linux. I don't know if any contracts have been signed already, but I guess it's not unlikely they would favor a distributor based in Brazil (similar to when the city of Munich went with SuSE).
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?
Well Connectiva were one of the first distributions to embrace apt-rpm (they may even have done a lot of the development work, I can't recall) and provide some of the major development impetus behind Synpatic which is far and away the best GUI package manager around. As far as I am concerned what Mandrake could gain from Connectiva is a move to apt-rpm and Synaptic. I know URPMI has a lot of fans but I think apt and Aynaptic may be the way to go for pakcage management. It helps standardise things as well - all the Debian based distros use apt, and several use Synaptic by default as well, and despite yum being the default apt-rpm and Synaptic is very popular on Fedora, and even SuSE (instead of YaST).
At the very least I hope Connectiva stays with apt-rpm and Synaptic. I would hate to see them shift to URPMI at this stage.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Marcelo Tosatti has been maintaining the 2.4 kernels you've been running for a long time. He's a Brazilian working for Conectiva.
You on the other hand are an asshole.
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)."
Marcelo Tosatti has been maintaining the 2.4 kernels you've been running for a long time. He's a Brazilian working for Conectiva.
Actually, he left Conectiva a long time ago
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
But of course he was modded up for something that wasn't actually truthful or informative. Welcome to Slashdot.
At least garcia was right.
How? - simply: it's people like myself, who have identified them as having a proper business model (Mandrake Club subscriptions + a well established support community + very good paid support + products which fit every requirement I had, in time, and within costs (e.g. latest being the 64-bit CPU support among the first distros), who have then - provided the finacial support they needed (as a result of their services, of course)
... and when the US economy got derailed but its leadership, a small migration of my money, from US stocks, into MDKFF stock, came to prove to me, in time, that they also knew and know HOW to make money ;)
== With enough Will Power, one could move mountains. With enough Brains, one would just leave them where they are ==
Just a note: in Brazil we speak Portuguese, not spanish.... we dont' say "libré" here.... we say "livre"
Let me clear some misconceptions on your post.
First, the majority of Conectiva users speak portugues, not spanish. I would guess at least 70% of the user base is in Brazil.
Second, Conectiva has been profitable for some time now, so this won't be exactly saving the Conectiva platform, as if it were dying.
Conectiva has some big corporate customers, including several banks. One of them is even using Conectiva Linux on their ATM machine. So I really don't understand why you wrote "customers" (using quotation marks).
Also, it is Conectiva, with just 1 N. Not Connectiva.
About what I think, is that people should do their homework before posting. Then again, this IS slashdot.
morcego
You're mostly right, it's a paper transaction that does not involve cash. The seller is paid in Mandrake stock, not in cash.
Yet your analogy with stock splits is erroneous. In a stock split, nothing really happens. Each old share becomes 2 or 10 new shares. It's just a story of splitting the cake in more pieces, but everybody still has the same proportion of the cake. An investor that used to own 1% of the stock will own twice (or ten times) more shares but still own 1% because the total number of outstanding shares has been doubled (decupled).
In a merger, the cake increases but you have a smaller part of it. An investor owning 1% of Mandrake before the deal will now own 0.96% of Mandrake+Conectiva (since Mandrake's market cap seems to be around 40mEUR).
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
You mistook Paraguay for Uruguay (a fairly common mistake, but I'm from Uruguay so I should know).
Yes, the name of the country is in native language, but the brother one of the first Presidents slaughtered all of our Indians - Uruguay and Costa Rica are about the only American countries without natives.
Back on topic, I'd say that buying Conectiva is a smart move, because Linux capitalizes on the anti-American (and anti-Microsoft) feeling that the current left wing presidents share, so it wouldn't be strange if the local governments switched to Linux (aided by Conectiva or whatever Linux support there is).
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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.
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. "