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..."

Comments

How?

[sfraggle]

How do they have the money to do this? Werent they almost bankrupt about a year ago?

Re:How?

[minus_273]

actually, how how, do they make money by giving their product away for free? I can see red hat doing consulting/support, but mandrake caters to a different market

Re:How?

[crow]

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.

Re:How?

[ReverendLoki]

Actually, I think it was 3 or 4 years ago, but not only were they almost bankrupt, they actually were in bankruptcy in the French court system. They got their act together though, and have come completely out of bankruptcy, and I believe have been in the black for a while now.

As far as I know, their main sources of revenue are from consulting, corporate support, some value added like packages of various proprietary closed-source software to their OS, and through their club membership program. I understand that this last one has been a decent boon to their books, moreso than one may think. Of course, I am not an accountant...

Re:How?

[morcego]

I find this particularly intriguing, since ABN-AMRO Bank has been the major shareholder (50%+) of Conectiva last time I checked. Most than US$ 2Mil worth of stocks.

Anyone knows how much (if anything) of Mandrake stocks are held by ABN ?

Looks like (from the numbers) Mandrake is getting only the remaing stocks still help incompany by the original founders of Conectiva.

Unless there is some big involvment of ABN on Mandrake, I find this all very strange.

Re:How?

[papaia]

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 ;)

Re:How?

[DCowern]

How do they have the money to do this? Werent they almost bankrupt about a year ago?

First, their financial situation was never as bad as it sounded. They had no money and couldn't fulfil debt obligations because a previous board of directors had moved them into to many business areas that were too far removed from their core business model (which has always been selling support and services to corporations).

Once they axed the former board, ceased unprofitable ventures, and got back to their core profitable model, things quickly improved. Their financial reports and quarterly summaries on their website go in to much more detail.

Secondly, they beefed up their Mandrake Club offering. It's currently a substantial portion of their revenue (I want to say 20-25%).

Third, released a bunch of stock a few years ago in an attempt to raise capital to renegotiate and pay off debt.

Lastly, the rules governing bankruptcy in France are far more forgiving and lenient than they are in the US. Mandrake wisely used the time and mechanisms that the bankruptcy filing awarded them and they're now seeing the benefits as they are on extremely sound financial footing.

By the way, yes, I am a shareholder and this news makes me very happy. The leadership at Mandrakesoft over the past few years has been excellent and I have faith in their ability to grow their company. Besides, with a 300% rise in their stock price in the last 4 months, I can't complain too much, now can I? =P

Re:How?

[DCowern]

Facts, please.

Mandrake club is currently less than or equal to 28% of their revenue, not the 80% you claim. From their latest quarterly summary:

Product sales amounted to 51% of revenues, enterprise services 21% and online sales and services 28%.

So you're dead wrong about where their money comes from.

Also, your numbers are slightly off. According to that same report, Mandrake is worth about 40 million euros (market value); that's about 50 million USD. Sure, they're not the size of RedHat but that's one of the reasons I like them.

I don't know where you got the loss figure from but I bought the stock at 2.1 euros. On 4 August 2004, it was 2.39 Euros. It is now 7.60 Euros. Unless Canadian math is different than American math, that's a 317% growth in the period from August 2004 to February 2005. Overall, that's a growh of about 361%. That's not a bad return over the 2.5 years that I've owned the stock

Representing your opinion and numbers you pull out of your ass as fact is embarassing when people call you on it, eh? ;-)

And oh, by the way, I happen to like M. LeMarois. He's always been cordial and straightforward in my dealings with him and he seems to have a good idea of where the company should be headed. That, of course, is just my opinion.

Re:How?

[ThinWhiteDuke]

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).

Re:How?

[rsborg]

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 ;)

Exactly. For those of you who are visually-oriented, A graph

I think Mandrakesoft knows it's core customers and treats them right. Connectiva could probably have found another bigger fish to latch onto, but probably not one so much inline with the core value of their customer base also.

Re:How?

[legirons]

"actually, how how, do they make money by giving their product away for free?"

They sell their product. For between $30 and $150 per box. And people like me buy it, so they make money.

It might sound odd to buy something that you can download without charge (or buy CDs for $6), but really that's just a convenient aspect of the distribution mechanism. If I lose my boxed copy of Mandrake, I can make a copy, download, or buy a cheap copy. (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)

It might still seem odd to pay when you can freeload, but my opinion of that is that I'm paying for the future availability of Mandrake. (just like I pay for wikipedia even though it's free) -- we're buying the ability for anyone in the world to use the best OS without charge. And that's quite different to paying for just a license.

Re:How?

[mixmasta]

prolly the strong euro lets them buy things in brazil for 1/4 the price.

Re:How?

[morcego]

ABN-AMRO was on of the investers in Mandrakesoft before it went public

And now one wonders how much of the new company ABN-AMRO owns.

Re:How?

[morcego]

And there you are wrong.

Conectiva was NEVER, EVER close to bankrupcy.

Yes, it was not profitable for most of its existance, but that situation changed some time ago (1 year or so).

From what I gathered from talking to various people, this is not about saving Conectiva. It is about making MORE money than they do now.

Re:How?

[morcego]

Several offices where closed, RJ and BH among others.

The truth to the issue was that Conectiva was cutting costs to make itself profitable.

Closing branch offices and doing business using business partness only was one of the things they did.

I'm not sure I agree 100% with what they did, or their motivation for it, but they are profitable now.

Re:How?

[opkool]

not only were they almost bankrupt, they actually were in bankruptcy in the French court system.

Actualy what MandrakeSoft did was asking for bankrupcy protection, which is different to bankrupcy. With this protection, MandrakeSoft was able to straight up its financial situation, went back to normal and now is profitable again.

Peace!

Re:How?

[opkool]

The "Euro strength" is only high compared with US Dollar. Compared to other currencies, is not such high.

It is the US Dollar which is very low compared to Euro. It is not the Euro being very highly priced everywhere else.

Peace!

New Name

[Conorb]

Mandrakiva ?

Re:New Name

[Elranzer]

Mandriva.... Man-gina Linux?

Re:New Name

[punkass]

"That's a huge BitchX!"

Re:New Name

[Donny Smith]

> Mandrakiva ?

Condrake!

What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[kevin_conaway]

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?

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[WindBourne]

Conectiva is big in South America. By merging, they extend their sales base. In addition, each of them have talented individuals on board that will hopefully create an even better OS.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[Coryoth]

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.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[NicolaiBSD]

which doesn't give it much weight as far as I'm concerned as I wouldn't trust a pile of shit from .br

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.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[LWATCDR]

I would say Mandrake gains a foot hold in Brazil.
Brazil is a big country. With a lot of resources. Often people in the northern hemisphere forget that that that there is another half of a world. Could they become the Linux of South America?

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[Anubis350]

amen

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[stm2]

Conectiva have offices and clients in Southamerica, so the gained presence in this region. In Argentina Connectiva was very big because they were the first to market a commercial linux in Spanish as default language. Then they closed offices in Buenos Aires and people migrated to other linuces that also had Spanish version (almost all of them now!). But they are still strong in Brasil.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[Reignking]

What about Portuguese?

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[jesuitninja]

The development of apt-rpm is stalled, afaict, and urpmi's dependency solver is superior to the one of apt (-rpm or not) (being able to solve a wider range of problems.) However apt-rpm is available for mandrakelinux for the weird people who really really want to use it. urpmi is not going to disappear soon. (Moreover it's written in Perl, so it's obviously superior :)

However the author of apt-rpm is working on a new package manager, smart, which looks very promising, but which is still alpha.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[double-oh three]

Brazil is also pro-open source, so having their product helped by the government will help.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[Espectr0]

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

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Perhaps they're interested in a foothold in the Brazilian market. I would be if I ran a distro company.

The Brazilians are rabid about free (libré) software and they have a growing economy. Check out Lessig's blog about his trip there.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[Otter]

Or, to put it another way -- how many RPM-based, desktop-oriented, major commercial distributions does the world need?

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[leoboiko]

Conectiva made apt-rpm. They also made the smart package manager, which I think is underrated. I hope the Mandrake guys see its potential.

Conectiva Linux will not exactly shift to urpmi, but instead it will be merged into Mandrake Linux.

And remember guys, we're called Conectiva, with a single "n".

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[bryam]

Marcelo works for Cyclades @ Brazil.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[morcego]

Actually, the lead developer on apt-rpm was Alfredo Kojuma (from the WindowMaker desktop). The lead developer for smart is Gustavo Niemeyer, which took over the apt-rpm project after Kojima left Conectiva to start his own consulting company (with other Conectiva ex-employers).

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[leoboiko]

Sorry, Lucio, but our country is spelled "Brazil" (and therefore "Brazilians") in English, and this is an English-speaking site. But we have a lot to be proud of from Conectiva, including tosatti, acme, apt-rpm, synaptic, smart, the vesa driver for X...

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[rednaxel]

Just talked with some Conectiva's employees on Freenode. Besides the skilled team, Mandrakesoft may be after the LA (Latin America, not Los Angeles) market, where Conectiva has a solid customers base.

PS: Yes, it is me. ;-)

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[ggvaidya]

You on the other hand are an asshole.

And they moderate it "informative" and "insightful". Go mods! :)

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[SignificantBit]

That's depend how do you define "rich country".. by overall PIB or per capita.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[xtracto]

I agree with you, is like those bastards that translate Mejico instead of Mexico . /WTF !!/

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[andreweb]

Just a note: in Brazil we speak Portuguese, not spanish.... we dont' say "libré" here.... we say "livre"

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[michelcultivo]

I've been using Conectiva more than 5 years, it's a very intuitive distribution that has facilities for both, desktop users and server users. But what is very useful is that we have a lot of people maintaining and suggesting new things to be in the next version like "apt-get" and some hardware configuration tools, you can find a dealer of support here in Brazil in the big cities and some medium cities too.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[leoboiko]

Do you know the names of all countries of the world in their own languages? Can you write and pronounce them all? Most Brazilians wouldn't be able to pronounce "United States of America" or "Nippon" or "Ukrayina" or "Bundesrepublik Deutschland", and they should not be required to. In fact, on slashdot I can't even input the cyrillic and kanji characters I'd need above. What we call "China" is Zhongguo, written with ideographic hanzi, and Chinese has five different vowel intonations; want to give a try at pronouncing or writing it?

Each language has its own idiosyncrasies. People shouldn't be required to learn the writing, spelling and pronounciation conventions of other languages, even for country names.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[ventonegro]

The Lua programming language is elegant, small, fast, powerful and easy to embed. It's currently the #1 scripting language for games, and it's developed in Brazil.

I don't know why you wouldn't trust anything that comes from here.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[michelcultivo]

No, Marcelo Tosatti is working at Cyclades now.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[morcego]

I define it was in how much money the govenment has that a company can take.

I think that is pretty how much every company defines it.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[Simon]

What does the Mandrake distribution gain with this merger?

As far as I am concerned what Mandrake could gain from Connectiva is a move to apt-rpm and Synaptic.

huh? Mandrake can move to apt-rpm and Synaptic any time they want. They don't have to merge with Conectiva to do that! It's Free Software after all.

The merger has got little to do with software and technical features, and everything to do with getting entry to South American markets.

Besides, both are heading towards the SMART package manager.

--
Simon

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[orasio]

The guy hit two out of three.

Marcelo works in Brasil. Hit.
Marcelo doesn't work for Conectiva anymore. Miss.
garcia is an asshole. Hit.

That's enough "informative" for me.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[iamwahoo2]

Doesn't rpm handle all the dependency management anyhow? I was under the impression that apt-rpm and urpmi are just front-ends and that back-ends like rpm and dpkg manage dependencies.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[rbanffy]

Brazilian government will probably go with IBM or other huge IT services provider because of the size of the demand. Don't forget selling free software is not about selling boxes but selling support. They may, of course, decide to go with Conectiva's distro for political reasons.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[morcego]

Neither dpkg or rpm can solve dependencies, unfortunately. They will point the dependencies, but not solve them.

That is why urpm/apt/smart are needed.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[Acer500]

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).

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[fsmunoz]

Is it mostly phonological changes from Spanish (Castillian) or does it have significant vocabulary from the Celts who lived in that region and in Galicia, in Roman times?

You start from a false assumption: that portuguese can be viewed and analysed by changes "from" castillian (AKA "spanish"). Portuguese, or Galaico-portuguese, was the literary and cultural language in the Iberian peninsula even before Castille started to gain political influence amonsts the other Iberian "nations" that nowadays constitute Spain. There are similarities, of course, due to the common latin background and proximity, but the vocabulary is different, the grammar is different, and the pronunciation is *entirely* different.

As from the celtic angle, it's hard to say. Everything related to the Celts has been so overdone that one never knows when to believe things. The ammount of celtic and germanic words in portuguese is higher than is castillian, which has a higher number of arabic words. Do note that portuguese also as many arabic inspired words. I stress this because there seems to be a trend in considering indo-european influences as "pure" and e.g. arabic ones as "unpure". Pure nonsense, of course.

The difference between languages is somewhat similar to the Dutch/German one, with perhaps a slighly larger degree of separation. Portuguese was also influenced by Occitanic spelling, whereas spanish wasn't. As a matter of fact, pronunciation wise, portuguese is much closer to catalan than to castillian.

Also, it's different when talking about European portuguese or Brazilian portuguese, since especially the pronunciation is different (the brazilian one tends to be "clearer", more open vowels, etc). There is also galician "situation", which I wount comment because it usually brings up a lot of strong opinions and old feelings. Let it suffice to say that, while traditionally Galician and Portuguese are the same language, if the current state of affairs in Galiza education-wise continues Galician will drift apart for good and become a distinct, portugese/castillian hybrid of sort. Which is a shame IMHO.

The African portuguese usually follows European portuguese in grammar and vocabulary, enriched with lots of local additions of course. Also, in Asia, there are plenty of portuguese-speaking communities, or at least "portuguese creole" speaking communities. Which is surprising, considering the investment that we (Portugal and Brazil, the two countries that could actually make a difference) make in the promotion of our language worldwide: around 1/100 of what would be acceptable to be even considered an effort.

Sic transit gloria mundi...

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Just a note: in Brazil we speak Portuguese, not spanish.... we dont' say "libré" here.... we say "livre"

Point taken, but you're on an English board. :) We say libré because we have no word for free-as-in-freedom aside from 'free' which usually means 'gratis', I wasn't trying to put words in the mouthes of the Brazillians.

I hadn't realized it was borrowed from Spanish; I assumed it was Latin, but it looks like that's 'liber'. I invite the classics majors to jump in now and provide all the relevant conjugations.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[swv3752]

I am a native English speaker that has had a couple of years of Spanish (and a year each of French and Latin), and I usually can puzzle out Portuguese, if I know the Spanish word. Spanish and Portuguese are remarkably similiar. They even sound similiar, but I am comparing Mexican Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Mexican and Castillan Spanish are very different accents.

My grandfather was a native Dutch speaker, and in talks with native Belgians and Germans, the impression I get is that Dutch and German are a bit more different.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[fsmunoz]

I am a native English speaker that has had a couple of years of Spanish (and a year each of French and Latin), and I usually can puzzle out Portuguese, if I know the Spanish word. The vocabulary *is* similar, I,as portuguese, can usually understand up to 90%, with different degrees of effort, of castillian. As normal in this situations the opposite is not so true (e.g. my Dutch friends tell me that they can understand German better than the other way around). Also, since you are learing the language, you are more prone to detect patterns, contexts, and similar vocabularies. I can usually detect the french roots in english much more quickly than, say, americans.

Spanish and Portuguese are remarkably similiar. They even sound similiar, but I am comparing Mexican Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.

Well, there is also another thing to consider: to a foreign, and speaking only of verbalised communication, related languages sound pretty much the same. I know that personally I mix up Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. I can even mix up Finnish with the previous ones, and Finnish has a totally different root. Add to that the fact that the pronunciation of Brazilian portuguese and of Mexican castillian are closer than the Iberian counterparts and you will easily mix up the languages. I still maintain though, and from people with a similar experience as you, that the two languages are actually easily recognisable.

Mexican and Castillan Spanish are very different accents.

Well, following what I said above, I don't detect a sharp distinction between them. I do however easily detect it between iberian and south-american portuguese.

My grandfather was a native Dutch speaker, and in talks with native Belgians and Germans, the impression I get is that Dutch and German are a bit more different. I initially mixed up the two quite a lot. Stupid, I know, because they are different, but as I said it's easier to think that the "others" are similar. The flemmish Belgians should be quite similar to the Dutch I think, if not only superficially different. The impression *I* get is that Dutch and German are more similar than Portuguese and Spanish. I am however subject to the same rules, so my view is probably tainted as well.

The Romans termed "barbarians" all of those that didn't speak latin. To them, all the other peoples in Europe talked the same :)

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[dcrocha]

I'm from Brazil. No contracts have been signet yet until now, and this so-called "plan" is nothing more than intentions at the moment. Even if this become true (which I doubt, because the current left-wing government here likes to promise to the people a *lot* of things that it won't do), it will be probably held either by a big company like IBM or the state-run Cobra Tecnologia, which, by the way, is one of the most corrupt companies in the country. Don't expect any benefit to Linux community from this eventual migration. I don't think Conectiva was ever taken into consideration for that job, because even here nobody has seen a new important installation of Conectiva Linux in years.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[stm2]

Sorry for the mistake. You are right, Tabare, Lula, Oviedo and Kirschner will push against MS. But I still not sure if they will do it expecting to get a nice "return" from MS or they really care about it.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[Mana Mana]

[Conectiva provides entree] to South American markets.

Aside from Brasilian Portugues, where precisely are the Castillian (spanish, for the laymen) box sets for sale off the .br or .com Conectiva sites?

They're supposed to dominate the South American market (overwhelmingly spanish parlante) with their wares, but several months ago I went searching for a box set (or an ftp site of same) for some spanish language friends and I could not find anything geared toward a spanish speaker. WTF.

Brasil is not South America. If it's there, somewhere poking around both sites, and googling fiercely yielded nothing.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[ReinoutS]

I thought the Mandrakelinux graphical package management tools weren't so great UI-wise, but my god, judging from the screenshots, SMART could really use some HIG love!

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[FatTux]

I'm sure MandrakeSoft knows Brazil is not South America. As did Conectiva, before they almost flopped and had to undercut assets and retreat from the Spanish-speaking markets in South America.

As Conectiva regained some strength and could walk over its legs again, it became an interesting starting point to MDK in South America.

With the merger and renewed strength, one can expect that localized websites/products/services in Spanish langage will be produced again.

Cheers.

Re:What does MandrakeSoft gain?

[bill_mcgonigle]

so say libre not libré.
Native spanish speaker(Mexican).

Gracias. :)

Re:From the press release:

[Conorb]

With Suse now an American brand (Novell) I think they might just be the number one European Linux company

Re:From the press release:

[reddazz]

Well Suse isn't European anymore, so I guess Mandrake can somehow claim this "title".

Re:From the press release:

[Emporerx]

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.

Simple...

[houstonbofh]

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...

Novell/SuSE

[gremlins]

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.

Re:Novell/SuSE

[Wudbaer]

Novell bought Ximian, not Xandros. Also cool stuff but different company. :-) Or did I miss something ?

Re:Novell/SuSE

[gremlins]

Tomato tomato

note to self: do not post slashdot comment untill had first cup of coffee.

Mandrakesoft promptly

[AbbyNormal]

surrenders to Conectiva and raises a white flag.

Uh oh...

[yuckysocks]

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*

Been with Mandrake for years

[kbahey]

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!

Re:Been with Mandrake for years

[SunPin]

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.

If you were an investor, your opinion would be different. They bought free code. Brilliant.

Re:Been with Mandrake for years

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly. Their stock value is increasing. I had bought some stock. If I did it, it is BECAUSE they respect free software, develop free software, and have their revenue on service, not code. I would not invest in a company that use proprietary software to lock their customers. This is called ethics.

Re:Been with Mandrake for years

[isotropique]

Mandrake is a company from France. They put a lot of efforts to document and translate Linux applications in french for their own market. I think their acquisition of Conectiva follows the same logic. Portuguese speaking people should be pleased by the announcement since it means more applications will be available in their own language.

I'm from Quebec and my primary language is French. I do not use Mandrake Linux but I feel their implication in the Linux movement improved my own experience. Vive Mandrake!

Re:Been with Mandrake for years

[kbahey]

I am not an investor, just a happy user.

Regarding "they bought free code", I think it is not what this is about. My guess would be that they bought a brand, marketshare, geographical penetration, and minshare.

Re:Been with Mandrake for years

[ScentCone]

I would not invest in a company that use proprietary software to lock their customers. This is called ethics.

"Ethics" means, essentially, "value system" or "code of conduct." We all have them - the question is whether your ethics are in line with someone else's ethics. What is wrong with a company making something proprietary if that allows them succeed, reward the people who put up money to form the company, pay the people who work for the company, and (most importantly) take care of a need that paying customers are willing to spend money on? If no one wanted to buy a company's proprietary solution, they would be out of business. So, where are the good/bad ethics, here?

When there's no force and no fraud, everyone involved in such an arrangement (software publisher, and software buyer) is in it mutually, and it is mutually beneficial. Many companies make specialized software so good that it doesn't need any "service" (as you put it), or at least certainly not enough to sustain the publisher (which is why Mandrake almost died). If they don't make enough money on service, and (if we were to use your "ethics") should not make any on the software they produce... who feeds the programmers writing the software? Where does the staff's health care come from? How does the company grow? I'm guessing that your answer will be: The State Takes Care Of All Of That. But of course, that requires taxes, and if no one is selling anything, where do the taxes come from?

Socialism may be an ethic, but it usually does a crappy job of motivating truly innovative groups of people to take risks and make shiny new things. It's an ethic, but it's a lousy one (um, unless you're lazy, of course, or unable/unwilling to innovate and compete).

Re:Been with Mandrake for years

[Pionar]

No, if you actually RTFPR (press release), you'd see that Connectiva had $2.2 million in revenue last fiscal year and broke even. And with big customers like the Brazilian army, they're in a good position to turn a profit this year.

Mandrake made a good power move into the South American Linux market with the market leader, dipshit.

Re:Been with Mandrake for years

[swv3752]

Mandrake through paid developers and volunteers, puts a lot of effort in localization.

Re:Yet?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

And it worked for your example company rather well, didn't it?

Re:Yet?

[Wudbaer]

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.

Re:Yet?

[lukewarmfusion]

Don't be so drawn in by the knee-jerk reactions to think that "acquisitions and mergers" are always a bad thing. You buy other companies to gain market share, brands, add to your own line of products and services, etc.

Such a move is often good for consumers, too. Imagine what would happen if all of the cell phone companies were small, local businesses. Not only would your service be crappy, but support and prices would probably suck too. By combining into a few major players, you get national service, a sturdy support system, and longevity - they're less likely to fold and leave you hanging.

You don't get to be the richest man in the world by letting your competition win.

Re:From the press release:

[Folmer]

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/

Growth Paths

[nurb432]

It may not be *THE* path, but it is *A* path..

Its also in vogue these days..

No mucho?

[QuietRiot]

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?

Re:No mucho?

[morcego]

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.

Mandrakesoft = (very) profitable company

[joestar]

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)."

Re:Mandrakesoft = (very) profitable company

[Monkelectric]

1.8 Million USD is "Very" profitable? What planet are you from? 1.8 milion could buy a couple nice computers at a "very profitable" company :)

I wanted to look up their stock stats but yahoo finance doesn't have them. Anyone know how many outstanding shares Mandrake has?

Re:Mandrakesoft = (very) profitable company

[ReinoutS]

I wanted to look up their stock stats but yahoo finance doesn't have them

But they do, Mandrakesoft's web site links here.

Re:Mandrakesoft = (very) profitable company

[Raumkraut]

They are on Yahoo finance - their symbol is "make.pa"

Re:Mandrakesoft = (very) profitable company

[joestar]

Do the ratio: 1.8 income / 6.7 revenues = 26.8%. Quite efficient.

Re:Mandrakesoft = (very) profitable company

[Gallowglass]

Well that means that profit is about 27% of gross revenues. That doesn't seem too shabby.

Oh!, Oh, I see. You weren't talking about profitability. You were talking about quantity. Not quite the same thing, ducks.

The *real* question is...

[joestar]

Will the resulting Linux distribution use apt-rpm or urpmi?

Re:The *real* question is...

[morcego]

Good change it will be neither. Odds point toward smart.

Re:The *real* question is...

[Jason Hood]

Lets hope not, To me that is like polishing several turds all at once (except apt maybe).

Start over, please.

Re:Yet?

[Oliver Defacszio]

Yeah, but you hate Microsoft for its business practices, so you can't possibly hope that Mandrake follows in Microsoft's footsteps, right? Anything else would be hypocritical of you, right?

Oh, wait, forgot where I was for a second.

and it wouldn't bother me a bit...

[zogger]

....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.

Kicking MS out of the 5th largest country?

[gelfling]

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.

Re:Kicking MS out of the 5th largest country?

[DFJA]

I think for this reason it is an extremely smart move of Mandrakesoft. It gives them prime access to a huge market that previously they were a much smaller player in.

Re:Kicking MS out of the 5th largest country?

[Cyberhawk]

Still don't get /. moderation.

What is funny about parent's post? He is absolutely right in his point, and justifies it.

C'mon people.

Re:Mandrake support level?

[ajs318]

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?

Re:From the press release:

[AkaXakA]

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?

Re:Mandrake support level?

[jr87]

umm..it will reset uptime...but it won't do the crash thing, at least it shouldn't anymore...

Re:Yet?

[leadsling]

Novell/SuSE acquisitions and mergers

I guess Suse threw themselves at the feet of Novell and sai "Take me!! Take me now!!!"

Re:From the press release:

[morcego]

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.

Heart attack averted

[cianduffy]

Looking quickly at this story in my RSS reader, I saw "Microsoft acquires Connectiva"....

Re:Heart attack averted

[morcego]

A united Mandrake+Conectiva distribution would be the prime target for Microsoft aquisition if they were out for it.

So you may not be that far from the mark there.

Re:From the press release:

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

Re:Mandrake support level?

[morcego]

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 ?

Re:Yet?

[mordors9]

Better than another companies business model, trying to sue your way into financial growth and success.

Re:How many people fired ?

[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.

Thank you.

[QuietRiot]

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?

Re:Thank you.

[morcego]

I'm sure it is very good for Mandrake, for the reasons already posted by several others here (mostly the brazilian government). And it will come pretty cheap for them, all things considered. If they invested that kind of money in comercial operations in Brazil (marketing, offices etc), they would not be able to get 10% of the market they are getting this way.

For Conectiva, I'm afraid to guess.

Conectiva turned into a profitable company mostly by firing employees and closing offices. That is what you get when you have a bank as the major shareholder of a company. Also, a good share of the technical ex-employees left on their own, instead of being fired, and opened their own companies. From that, you can see how much potential market was there. As far as I know, all those companies are profitable (although they are much smaller than Conectiva).

When RedHat opened their office here in Brazil, it was maned almost entirely by people that have left Conectiva.

On the other hand, I always considered Conectiva Linux technicaly more advanced than Mandrake.

So, IMHO, if we can join Conectiva's technical expertise, with Mandrake's comercial expertise, we might end up with a very nice company.

I have tried contacting a couple of Conectiva founders (board members) since I've heard of this. Got no answer so far, which is probably to be expected.

Re:Thank you.

[morcego]

Just as an extra note, we don't know where this shares are coming from.

Are their the shares still held by the original founders, or are they the shares that ABN-Amro Bank held ?

If their are the shares held by the original founders, one has to guess how many shares of Mandrake are held by ABN, and if this is some kind of twisted move from ABN to get a hold of Mandrake too.

Re:Yet?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Do I hate Microsoft? I don't remember that.

I think hating or loving companies who are out to make money no matter what they have to do is just foolish.

Re:From the press release:

[morcego]

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.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:From the press release:

[AkaXakA]

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.

Quality of Mandrake Nowadays

[Rocko Bonaparte]

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.

Re:Quality of Mandrake Nowadays

[Cap'n Steve]

Maybe a lot's changed, but I'm a linux newbie with 10.1 community edition on my laptop. I was able to choose in great detail what I wanted to install and I've even managed to compile a couple things. I thought Mandrake was known for the quality of it's installation system.

Re:Quality of Mandrake Nowadays

[swv3752]

It is known for it's easy installation system. The grandparent probably installed with only the first cd, which while it will instal a decent desktop, does not provide all the packages that the 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or dvd sets will provide.

Re:Quality of Mandrake Nowadays

[Mark_MF-WN]

Where've you been? Around that time, most distros were having some growing pains. There have been some major architectural changes in how a Gnu/Linux desktop box works. Mandrake and Fedora, being among the most progressive distros, went through a lot of difficult changes.

Re:Quality of Mandrake Nowadays

[buchanmilne]

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!

The only version of Mandrake that doesn't include compilers is the Discovery Edition, which is not avialable for download. But, even on Discovery, you can use online urpmi repositories to install any software you like.

Since this seems to be your main argument, the rest of your post is really invalid.

Please try a bit better with your next troll.

Re:Quality of Mandrake Nowadays

[infolib]

There have been some major architectural changes in how a Gnu/Linux desktop box works.

Just out of curiosity, could you name a few of the major ones? (I've been running Linux, mostly mdk, since '99, but my involvement in the nuts and bolts of my distro has been rather on-and-off).

Re:Quality of Mandrake Nowadays

[Mark_MF-WN]

There was the switch from XFree86 to xorg, the switch to the 2.6 kernel, the switch from the old-school /dev system to DevFSD and then to UDEV, and the introduction of the hotplug system. CUPS has been evolving quite a bit, with huge numbers of new drivers and graphical interfaces to support desktop use. Xorg has changed a lot even over the relatively short period since its inception; in the first few months there were dozens of major patches introducing new modules. The X font system has changed substantially (I think the font system has been replaced twice now, but I wouldn't swear to it). Fedora had it's VERY painful transition to SELinux, although I think they've worked through the problems (I'm a Mandrake man myself, so I'm only peripherally aware of Fedora's evolution). A lot of software had to changed to support Alsa instead of OSS. The GStreamer framework was introduced, and many media-streaming applications migrated it.

Plus of course, all the normal evolutionary stuff, like new versions of Gnome and KDE, more internationalization, more graphical utilities.

Most importantly, many major applications like Xine and Quake2 were ported to AALib, allowing them to enjoyed on God's chosen peripheral, the ASCII terminal.

Re:Quality of Mandrake Nowadays

[Rocko Bonaparte]

It must have been the Discovery Edition. I don't have the CDs with me to verify.

Re:Quality of Mandrake Nowadays

[infolib]

Ok, thanks :-) I've been aware of some of this stuff, but the big picture of change didn't really register on me. Happy draking!

Re:Quality of Mandrake Nowadays

[Mark_MF-WN]

It's a testament to the robustness of the GNU/Linux desktop that most of this stuff was pretty behind-the-scenes for users.

Sofware is about services.

[jotaeleemeese]

Anyone that still believes it is about buying and selling code is compltetely deluded.

Profitability is not measured in absolute numbers.

[jotaeleemeese]

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.

Re:From the press release:

[clymere]

IBM representatives have repeatedly stated that they have no interest in owning any one distro.

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.

Re:What are you talking about ?

[KingBahamut]

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.

Nice merge ...

[wagner_bila]

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 ...

Re:Yet?

[smeat]

Lip my stocking, ohh lip my stocking!!
</Bad Japanese Accent>


smeat!

Re:What are you talking about ?

[thehunger]

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?

Re:What are you talking about ?

[KingBahamut]

I have to aggree with hunger on this issue. Its common sense.

YUM and Fedora, APT and Connectiva, URPMI and Mand

[hduff]

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.

Re:Mandrake support level?

[INeededALogin]

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

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[account_deleted]

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My note on Mandrake Usability.. it 'just works'

[hyfe]

I'm posting this from my dell inspirion 8200 laptop running Mandrake 10.1. Mandrake installed advanced power savings, sound, network (including wireless with a little extra work) and graphic card automatically no-hazzle. This is alot better than what the other distroes I've tried have managed. (and yes; I'm one of the funny people who prefer that things 'just work')

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.

Re:My note on Mandrake Usability.. it 'just works'

[djuuss]

Me too, i'm a mandrakeclub silver member, running 10.2 beta2. I believe mandrake, using apt-rpm and synaptic (from the mandrake control center) will make a lot of people more aware on the alternatives too m$. SuSe is okay too, but it's not good. I hear 9.2 has some mayor improvements in it though.

OH MY GOODNESS!

[jack_csk]

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

More Visible

[soloport]

Yeah, but this chart makes things look much more crisp and clear.

That's true, but

[grumling]

If you do a default installation, you cannot compile a kernel. And, I've had one heck of a time getting anything other than the included applications running. I'm sure lots of that is operator error, but still, for the "easiest" Linux distro out there, it still can't quite get to Windows' installation ease.

Re:Mandrake support level?

[Knuckles]

use Linux only to boot into illegal copies of Windows

Pray tell, how do I do that?

Only 51% sales

[anno1602]

Actually, only 51% of their revenue comes from sales, the rest is consulting/support.