Mandriva Up For Sale

The French company that creates and sells the Mandriva Linux distribution is up for sale. The news about Mandriva SA originally surfaced on a French Mandriva portal, and was confirmed by one of the potential buyers. Mandriva the distribution is a merger of the former MandrakeLinux and Conectiva distros. Mandriva the company is no stranger to hard times, having sought bankruptcy protection in the past.

Comments

I love and use mandriva

[Anonymous Coward]

So I tried to put in a bid, but I can't get my printer to work with my maching

Poor Mandrake

[gorzek]

Whatever happened to these guys? Mandrake was actually my first foray into Linux. I remember it being quite user-friendly, it was just in the late '90's so driver support was dodgy. I kept it around on one computer or another for years until I finally gave up on it and went to Ubuntu. Just felt like it fell behind the times and was no longer the easiest Linux to use anymore.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[CannonballHead]

Just felt like it fell behind the times and was no longer the easiest Linux to use anymore.

It's amazing what having millions of dollars to throw into a software project can do.

To my knowledge, Mandriva did not have someone behind it with loads of money.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[betterunixthanunix]

What happened is that Mandriva could not out-compete Ubuntu when it came to user-friendliness, probably because Canonical has a magical supply of money that Mandriva does not. Mandriva also seemed to be targeting the wrong markets: they should have gone after the enterprise server market, where the money is, rather than the desktop Linux market, where there really is not that much money to go around. With so many no-cost Linux distros around, and with those distros becoming easier and easier for people to use, trying to sell a "power pack" is really not the best strategy, especially not in tough economic times.

Oh well, one business goes bankrupt, another comes to be. This is not the end of the Linux business, it is just the end of one of the well known players.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[gorzek]

Looking at it another way, Mandrake at least proved a user-friendly Linux was *possible*. Without that, we may not have had Ubuntu at all. The Linux community is indebted to the trail Mandrake blazed, but its time has long since passed, and all the money is behind Ubuntu now.

I don't mind that, as I like Ubuntu a lot, and have found it a remarkably easy distro to set up and use.

I suppose it's inevitable that Linux distros will be born, reach their peak, decline, and die. Diversity in the Linux ecosystem is a good thing. When (not if!) Ubuntu starts to slack, someone else will step up and replace it with something even better.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[hduff]

What happened?

1. Poor management decisions after the IPO took the company far afield from its core business and sent them into bankruptcy. They did emerge (not a common things in French bankruptcies), but seemed to have lost their edge. They kept trying to modify a consumer-based business model (vice and Enterprise model) and kept failing.

2. Their graphics always sucked. They were very cartoon-ish and not enticing the way, sat, Ubuntu graphics were, so it was difficult to have a "cool factor" to bring in younger users.

3. Loss of vision. They initially wanted to do "RedHat Done Better", but decided to abandon RedHat's python-based tools for their own perl-based tools because, well, RedHat's sucked, but it took a lot of time, manpower and money to re-invent the wheel. They let "we-have-better-way-dammit" influence far too many of their decisions

4. They lost a lot of their original core in-house developers and a lot of their community supporters because of their management decision s and choices. That meant they lost a lot of their momentum.

I hope they find a buyer that will take them back to their original vision and revitalize one of the nicer distros. They had excellent implementations of the popular desktops, great user and admin tools.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[gmack]

Broadcom's Linux problem is Broadcom. They insist on forcing everyone to use their own crappy non open sourced drive that fails on all but a few kernels. Essentially they are trying to be like NVIDIA without being at all competent at creating drivers. It's a sad day when a company's windows drivers work better in Linux (NDIS) than their Linux drivers.

I had problems with my DELL laptop and Broadcom but I quickly learned the best fix for that is to just order an $18 Atheros based Mini-PCIE card from China and just swap the blasted thing.

Wonder why?

[MrEricSir]

I wanted to like Mandriva (or Mandrake as it was then called) but the configuration interfaces were just too confusing. But the real kicker was the lack of documentation and community support online.

These are two things Ubuntu has done right. I think it's easy to see why Ubuntu stole Mandriva's thunder.

Re:But...

[Intron]

You're thinking of CentOS. Mandriva is a separately maintained distro. It takes a lot of work to test and package a distro.

Translated Article

[Freshly Exhumed]

With Google Translate we can see that the MLO site is reporting that Mandriva,
the French/Brazilian Linux distribution publisher, soon may not be able to meet payroll. Two potential buyers (LightApp from the UK, Linagora from France) have apparently stepped forward to look at buying the entire company or parts of it.

To me it would be a pity if Mandriva ceased to exist as we know it. The distribution is one of the best out there for polish and
attention to detail, and would be a good corporate buy based on that alone. I've always felt that it would be a great "house"
Linux version for a big player like Dell, HP, etc. but clearly there are factors stopping such computer companies or other Linux
distributors from buying it.

Oh well, if they cannot make it then that's the way it goes...

Re:Translated Article

[ianare]

Looks like Linagora has confirmed ongoing negotiations ...

http://www.mandrivalinux-online.org/news/news-0-88+mandriva-a-vendre-linagora-confirme.php

Re:But...

[betterunixthanunix]

Mandriva forked from Red Hat many years ago, and has really been independent since then. They employ something like 70 people, and they do actually sell shrink wrapped packages (last I checked), and they have servers and advertising to pay for. The real problem is that they never had a firm grip on their market (the desktop Linux market, which is admittedly a difficult market to really get a firm grip on) and they could not compete with Canonical's magic money supply.

Mandriva is Prime Real-Estate

[Zombie Ryushu]

Mandriva is Linux that works. Mandriva is some of the most prime real estate in th Linux world, from arcade cabinets like mine, to domain controllers, Mandriva is the easiest Linux to configure anywhere.

Mandriva is the only Linux distribution where you can setup a Samba Domain with no interaction with the Console.
Setting up a Kerberos realm backended by a LDAP server with Samba on top is easiest under Mandriva. They have a guy dedicated to just that. They have Wizards to create PXE Servers, DNS Servers, Mail Servers, and everything else. Mandriva has some wonderful assets. They just have not been marketed well, in the right hands, Mandriva could really spark a revolution in the Linux world.