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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."
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.
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.
I'd say that if anything's the grand-daddy - it's Red Hat.
Bitch, please! ;)
Slackware is the oldest distro still around. First release in July 1993. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware Debian was first released in August 1993 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian Redhat's distro was first released October 1994 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat
Sometimes when I'm working on projects things disappear, I suspect gremlins.
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.