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Shareholder Fight Threatens Mandriva SA
LinuxScribe writes "A shareholder fight (French [Google translation]) has put one of the oldest commercial Linux vendors at risk of shuttering on January 16. If Mandriva can't raise 4 million euro in capital by then, it will have no choice but to cease operations."
Same here. In addition to being user friendly, it was, in my opinion, rock solid stable. Mandrake is what got me using Linux not just playing with it. It was never right at the cutting edge; always one back from the latest release of KDE or Gnome or what have you. I stuck with it through the change to Mandriva and still use it on a couple of machines. I'll miss it if it folds.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Mandrake has a tradition of problems, basically since they were Mandrake. Back then, they used to be the more desktop friendly redhat. Being French, they had good i18n support before redhat did, switched to utf early one, provided international packages, and also multimedia. But at that time their community was registered users only, if you didn't have the current version purchased: no soup for you.
Mandrake was always reluctant to share documentation. As a result, they cut themselves off from the larger community. Good innovations like a metapackager, that got users out of rpm-dependency hell long before redhat moved in that direction, or also mandrakes system of setting security level never made it back to a wider audience.
You realize that as awesome as Debian is, it's initial release was in 1996, whereas Red Hat's was in 1993, right?. Considering Mandrake was originally based off of it, I'd say that if anything's the grand-daddy - it's Red Hat.
And that's the fundamental flaw of your whole argument. Gnome 2 and KDE 3 are DIFFERENT, but they are DEFINITELY "polished" and very usable, even if you don't PERSONALLY like them. To claim otherwise is such biased claptrap it's sickening.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
And that's the fundamental flaw of your whole argument. Gnome 2 and KDE 3 are DIFFERENT, but they are DEFINITELY "polished" and very usable, even if you don't PERSONALLY like them. To claim otherwise is such biased claptrap it's sickening.
I think you missed his point - successful desktop OS are successful because they just work - Linux is not there yet; and there is very little interest in fixing things that keep that from happening. Linux is very much a hobbyist OS for people who ilk ego tinker - but most computer users don't ant to tinker, or as the OP put it:
Home users don't care about freedom or CLI or DIY they care about "its just works and keeps working and is easy to use"
Ad to that there is no money in making it just work - why should a Dell, for example, turn it into a viable alternative when any competitor can take their work for free? And so Linux languishes on the desktop; and finds its niche in areas where companies can make money.
I'd add to his argument that there is no "killer app" for Linux that makes switching from WIN/OSX necessary. Much of the effort goes to building free "me too" apps to replicate apps on those platforms., and in many cases those same me too apps are available for them, so why bother switching?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Correlation, causation, etc. When exactly did the Ubuntu project contribute to X.org?
The reason you don't have to spend 20 hours fucking with X configuration files is because the X project improved, not because of Ubuntu.
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No, because your original 50 cents investment entitled you to 50% of the company at the time it was made. If the rest of the shareholders hold sufficient power to override your will and accept more investment, your percentage of ownership will drop (and your investment stays valued at 50 cents). To do it otherwise would make it impossible for companies to rise more capital after the initial forming, because what would the new shares be backed by?
No. Your entitlement is limited to the shares you hold. These may represent 50%, 25% or even 1% ownership of the company at various times. This dilution of ownership is no more stealing than other companies taking market share from yours is, but rather a normal part of how the stock system works. Calling it stealing means that either you didn't bother making sufficient research before investing, and have no one but yourself to blame, or did, invested anyway, and are now whining because you didn't think the rules would really apply to you.
What's happening is that partial ownership of the company is being sold to a new investor in exchange for capital through a majority decision, which might not suite all old shareholders; however, that's the price they pay for being mere partial rather than sole owners.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Sorry you and the other poster got modded down friend, but I intended and expected to be modbombed as i call it like I see it and truth rarely follows groupthink. The simple fact that so many here refuse to accept (Notice how many said "Windows and OSX isn't polished" which if that isn't koolaid chugging I don't know what is) is that the level of integration you are talking with Windows and OSX, where EVERYTHING follows strict conventions, like scrollbar goes here and icons must be like so and keyboards shortcuts should be thus, all of that COSTS MONEY because without it? You get what you have now which is rampant itch scratching. Just look at your average "consumer friendly" Linux like Mint or PCLOS. You have apps that follow the Mac way, some follow the Windows way, some go for the old school UNIX methods of doing things. There is NO consistency there AT ALL. Why is that? Its because the devs are working for free and frankly don't give a fuck about jumping through some hoop if they don't want to and because they aren't getting paid you can take it or leave it friend, because they are just scratching an itch, not like they can be fired for not following the rules.
Then you have the horrible bugs and driver breaking. Just look at the Canonical bugtracker where many bugs are measured in YEARS without being fixed. Some have thousands of complaints yet they sit, why? no payments to devs mean they don't want to do shit works for free, its simple human nature. if i'm gonna give up my own free time I'm gonna be doing something FUN and coding is fun, bug fixing? Not fun, not even a little fun, in fact it sucks ass. I mean when Dell, one of the biggest OEMs on the entire planet, has to run their own repos because if they don't the whole thing shits itself and dies? You got serious problems friend. Why does it do that? Why would the bog standard boring ass hardware that Dell uses, the same Realtek and Intel and ATI and Nvidia chips that are in more than 85% of the computers on the planet still break, even though these are well known hardware? Its simple because the rampant itch scratching of the devs from Torvalds on down simply are worried about scratching their own little itches instead of worrying about the big picture and what their changes do to the ecosystem. Go to ANY forum after a release and see how many "Update foo broke my drivers!" posts you'll find. Just for the hell of it i tried counting on the Ubuntu forum after the last release and I quit at over 700 and there were literally page after page I didn't bother counting. Now realize for every ONE complaint you probably have a couple of hundred that just got frustrated and either went somewhere else or gave up completely and went to Windows or OSX. One of the long time posters on LinuxInsider has been a Linux server admin for over a decade and she recently gave up and is looking at either BSD or Mac, why? because the latest apt-dist-upgrade wiped out her email and left her with a broken machine. Data loss in this stage of the game is unacceptable people!
What I'm trying to get at folks is the FOSS model works in SOME cases but not ALL cases and trying to fit the FOSS model into all cases is a giant FAIL and consumers are one of those fail cases. like I said consumers won't buy support contracts, so how do you make the hundreds of millions required to pay the devs to get the busted shitters fixed? you don't which is why we have the mess we have. mark my words in less than 5 years Canonical will be OUT of the desktops biz because they can't keep losing money and Shuttleworth made it clear there won't be any more checks. that's why at CES there is gonna be an UbuntuTablet and you see more and more spent on Ubuntu Server and by extension less on Ubuntu desktop. Everyone is gonna have to face the fact that the tin cup model simply doesn't provide the millions in steady income required to build a world class desktop and if you want to compete with Apple and MSFT
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.