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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."
An existing investor wants to make sure that his investment isn't marginalized through accepting additional investment at unfavorable terms, in turn reducing their effective ownership over Mandriva.
can you blame them?
I was a Mandrake/Mandriva guy for years. Before Ubuntu, it was THE "newbie" distro. It's still very user-friendly.
Once all this uncertainty started about a year ago, I switched to Mageia, which is a community fork of Mandrake.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Since the Ubuntu desktop wreckage of late I've switched to Debian. couldn't be happer. cut out Shuttleworth's meddling and go straight to the source :-)
If they were profitable, or even revenue neutral, this wouldn't be a problem.
I'm not saying anything bad about Mandriva, rather the summary who seems to blame the inability to get loans, whereas the inability to get loans is the natural way of the world. Eventually it happens to everyone.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The phrasing in that letter is kind of torturous and very flowery, and Google translate misses in a few spots.. (But does shockingly well over all.)
Here's a slightly cleaner translation (my own):
To the associates and directors of Bryan Garnier:
Mr. Olivier Garnier De Falletans,
In this letter, we wish to bring to your attention the extreme gravity of the situation which we believe ourselves, as employees of Mandriva, to be the victims.
We are determined to no longer sit back and endure this situation passively.
In less than four weeks, our company could be effectively forced to file for bankruptcy and cease all activities because its indispensable recapitilization has been two times prevented by Linlux SARL, and this even though Townarea Trading & Investment Ltd, our other majority shareholder, was inclined to support entirely the cost, an amount of 4,000,000 euro.
Now, Linux SARL, an organization which seems to be under your control and that of Mr. Marc Goldberg, your employee and manager, had itself no financial obligation and therefore could not be but a beneficiary of this salvage operation.
The refusal which was offered by Linlux SARL to all the propositions made during the general assemblies of September 30th and December 5th 2011 is and remains for us absolutely incomprehensible and absolutely unjustifiable.
There are no less and no more than 45 direct jobs between Paris, Brasil, our external personnel, and all the indirect jobs at our subcontractors and suppliers.
In addition, following a reorganization already in progress, the operations in Brasil are almost breaking even, and a new business plan lays out the reorientation of the business with solid prospects for growth for next year.
Very worried for the future of our company, we ask you please to immediately reconsider a decision, which will turn out not only extremely negative for our and your future, but also for that of the world of free software in Europe.
While waiting for your prompt decision, we hope you will accept, Ms, Mr., our sincere regards.
The problem here is that so many distributions are high-quality and free that these days, you need to offer something extra in order to either excite people into using and coding to support your distro and creating hype and popularity or giving them enough in support to encouraged a paid-for environment that works. With Ubuntu, it's been usability...it's such a far-reaching and diverse distro with several major window managers offered that it covers a lot of ground -- and handing out disks for free way back in the day (are they still? -- I'm personally not sure...) certainly helped a lot. My first installation of Ubuntu was from a free disk I got from them. The user base and support system is also MASSIVE. I mean, I've used many, many distros over the years from Fedora to Mint to Ubuntu and many more but usually whenever I'd search for the fix to some problem it would inevitably be posted in some Ubuntu forum or blog. That not only gets the name out there but helps users to easily get accustomed to the different environment if they're switching from another OS.
I never even tried Mandriva. Why? It didn't seem like it had anything special to offer. Now keep in mind that I've tried over 20 or so distros over the years. The fact that wasn't one of them says something. If they want to stick around, they need to take a lead from other Open Source software like Ubuntu, Slackware, or even non-Linux distributions...just desktop software that's become popular like various media players or Firefox itself.
Bottom line? Offer something unique/special/above the competition and you'll succeed...if you're not going to do that...then the question really becomes: why would anyone move to your distro anyway, let alone stick with it?
And you just hit the nail on the head on why there aren't any Linux desktops that can compete with the polish and intuitiveness of OSX and Windows. to bring Linux up to that level would cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollar because the only way to herd developers is by paying them, otherwise you get what you have now with everyone scratching their own personal itches and then none of the "busted shitters" as i call them get fixed. When folks are doing work for free they are gonna do what they consider fun, nobody wants to be the guy that goes and fixes the busted shitters. just look at how many bugs on canonical is over two years, over three, i think the oldest ones are going on six years now because nobody wants the shitty jobs so they just don't get done.
Well when you are building a consumer OS guess what? there are literally THOUSANDS of truly shitty thankless lousy jobs that need doing. there is bug fixing and QA and regression testing and making sure all the UIs match the OS standard and maintaining your own kernel because God knows when Torvalds will get an itch and break all your drivers and writing all the help files and documentation and I'm sure if i sat here a couple of minutes i could easily name a dozen or two more truly lousy, boring, shitty, thankless jobs that HAVE to be done if you want a world class highly polished OS where everything "Just works" and is so simple and intuitive that Suzy the checkout girl can work it. This is why Apple and MSFT pay a metric shitload of money to developers, because they won't do those shitty jobs for free.
And THAT, that right there, is the problem. Consumers won't buy support contracts so the Red Hat method of making money is right out and why should the OEMs pay you shit when they can just "pull a CentOS" and have the thing for free? Gotta look out for the shareholders you know. i'm sure dell threw a few bucks Canonical's way but I seriously doubt it was even 1/10th what they were spending to build Ubuntu. Has Canonical even made a dime in profit yet? and the much vaunted community won't back you up, just look at how ATI bent over backwards to open up their code, even hiring driver developers to work for the free driver group out of their own pocket only to have every forum covered with posts that read "LOL use Nvidia" or the simple fact that more than a THIRD of the webservers on the entire planet are not using RHEL but, survey says....CentOS, an OS created by a bunch of cheapskates that used to sell an appliance that required RHEL who said "Fuck 'em, we'll just cut out the copyrights and then we won't have to pay shit!" and now of course they don't pay shit, not when compared to the RHEL licenses they used to buy.
How many here have cut a check to canonical? How many have sent money to their favorite distro? despite the BS I'm sure this post will get i bet if you looked at the numbers you are talking maybe 1 in 10,000 if you are lucky. So don't complain when Linux on the desktop goes exactly nowhere, just look at how canonical is now gonna be selling some tablet starting at CES and is spending an increasing amount of their limited resources on the server. its simply because with the FOSS model there isn't any money to be made on consumers and if anyone was to sink the hundreds of millions required to make a world class rock solid picture perfect Linux desktop it wouldn't be five minutes before just like Mint you had a knockoff stealing all the users thanks to being 'free as in beer" but without the work and money required to bring it up to OSX and Win 7 its 'free as in worthless" and despite the modbombing i'm sure to get for pointing out the truth THAT is why Linux isn't gaining shit on the desktop. I mean when MSFT puts out a flaming turd like Vista and the OS with a $1000 barrier to entry gains like mad and the "free as in beer" OS don't gain shit, how big of a cluebat do you have to be hit by to see the FOSS model don't work in this case? 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" and I'm sorry but Linux is still a long way from that friends and I don't see it getting any better, if anything all the itch scratching by the DE devs has made it worse.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
there are a large number of profitable, and/or revenue neutral businesses that are closed all the time. why?
because profit and revenue are not the only things that matter. sometimes politics matters more. and sometimes someone thinks they can make 'more profit' for themselves by closing down a profitable company than by keeping it open.
the article explains all this very simply.
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.
I have been with Mandriva since version 9, it was the distro I picked which got me into Linux, so have been with the distro for a lot of years now. However since the beta of Mageia 1 came out, I jumped ship - I didn't want to deal with Mandriva's new menu system for a start.
The problem I see with a shareholder revolt is, the company should have found a way to not fire their main developers in the first place. Now they are working on the community Mageia Linux version, and who is left at Mandriva?
IMO if they wanted a better distro, you should get more people to bother to report bugs so they can be investigated, not think someone else has found it. This should be made easy for non technical users so that others with more experience may try re-creating the bug. The various distro webpages to report a bug are way over the top for a new person to understand and report a bug.
I myself among now lots of others reported various Nouveau free nVidia driver issues where there are problems if you want to switch to the real nVidia driver to get 3D. Stuff like Compiz, Google Earth, or BZFlag won't work with the Nouveau driver.... but 2D stuff works fine with Nouveau.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
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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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.
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.
If you mean "Torvalds on down" as the people working on the kernel, you're barking up the wrong tree. It is very rare that any serious regression slips by on that level. Most of the problems Ubuntu have had are because of the poorly tested software stack they put on top, like for example PulseAudio or NetworkManager, that broken Bluetooth stack and so on. Of course it makes little difference to the end user, but there's nothing the kernel can do if it never actually sends the audio to the hardware or goes in an infinite loop, UI settings are ignored or set wrong or it's a user space driver that is borked. In fact, the problem is that they don't have a Torvalds who give them the hairdryer treatment when they generate crap and break things that used to be working, because they don't report to him at all. I do agree that the integration tests are lacking, there's not nearly enough testing all the way from UI to hardware doing what it should. But the lowest part of that stack that Linus manages is the one that gives the least grounds for concern.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Problem is that despite that cathedral model, things ain't consistent even b/w 2 similar OSs like Windows XP and 7. I had bought a copy of Adobe Acrobat 6 (the complete package, not the free Reader that one can simply download from their website). Guess what? I can run it in XP, but not under 7. And we're talking both win32 OSs here - I'm not talking about a 32-bit XP to a 64-bit 7. And unlike in Linux, where an app which one didn't pay for that doesn't work in a subsequent version, I paid for this app and would expect it to work when I'm not doing a major OS overhaul. I could understand it if I were migrating from Windows 98 to XP, or if the Monopoly game that I was running under Window 95 didn't work under XP. But this sort of breakage b/w just 2 (actually 1) generations of an OS change? And no, hypervisor is not available under 7 HP, only in the server 2008 and above models.
Even aside from that, there are so many things that have changed that it's not even funny. MS Office 1993 was fine, but in 1997, they introduced new formats, had all those ribbons and totally reset everybody's learning curve. One can't even revert to the old interface if one wants to. And at the OS level, just look @ the Control Panel - what it was under XP, and how it's changed in Vista/7. Some of them are improvements, like the Network Sharing & Neighborhood, but just finding things now is a royal mess. If one tries to change desktop colors, one is forced into the classic version, or one has to go w/ readymade themes. Only major improvement to 7 is 64-bit support, (if I had 4GB or above of RAM, that's what I'd do) and IPv6 support. I know you think the latter is a clusterfuck, but the IETF had determined pretty early on that it wasn't possible to have an IPv4 compatible addressing scheme that didn't require overhauling all routers, which is why, since they had to do something this major anyway, they came up w/ a whole suite of enhancements to the protocol to give us what IPv6 now is.
And in Windows 8, I certainly hope that they leave the Windows 7 default interface as an option, instead of forcing people to the Metro UI and disabling the 'Windows' key on the keyboard. I happen to be an adventurous person who is more than happy to check out a new look OS, but having to change things like a keyboard is unacceptable. Let them use Metro in that Nokia Lumia or any Windows tablet that Nokia or anyone else comes out w/, but leave the laptops alone.