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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!
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
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.
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!
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
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.
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.
Novell bought Ximian, not Xandros. Also cool stuff but different company. :-) Or did I miss something ?
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)."
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.
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?
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
Looking quickly at this story in my RSS reader, I saw "Microsoft acquires Connectiva"....
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.
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.
morcego
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. "
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 ...
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? """