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Mandriva SA Cedes Control To Mandriva Community
jfruh writes "Mandriva SA, one of the oldest pure Linux companies still out there, was on the verge of shutting down earlier this year, but escaped by the skin of its teeth. Now, however, the company is punting control of its flagship Linux distribution to its developer community, leaving Mandriva SA's future prospects up in the air. From the blog post: 'This means that the future of the distribution will not be arbitrary[sic] decided by the Mandriva company anymore, but we intend to let the distribution evolve in and under the caring responsibility of the community.'"
Around a year ago, I was mindlessly surfing the internet (as I often do) when I came across an enigmatic web page. The page, which looked like a warning from my web browser, informed me that I had a virus installed on my computer and that to fix it, I should install a strange anti-virus program that I'd never heard of (which I found peculiar considering the fact that I already had anti-virus software installed on my computer). Despite having reservations about installing it, I did so anyway (since it appeared to be a legitimate warning).
I cannot even fathom what I was thinking at that time. Soon after attempting to install the so-called anti-virus software, my desktop background image changed into a large red warning sign, warnings about malware began making appearances all over the screen, and a strange program I'd never seen before began nagging me to buy a program to remove the viruses. What should have been obvious previously then became clear to me: that software was a virus. Frustrated by my own stupidity, I began tossing objects around the room and cursing at no one in particular.
After I calmed down, I reluctantly took my computer to a local PC repair shop and steeled myself for the incoming fee. When I entered, I noticed that there were four men working there, and all of them seemed incredibly nice (the shop itself was clean and stylish, too). After I described the situation to them, they gave me a big smile (as if they'd seen and heard it all before), accepted the job, and told me that the computer would be working like new again in a few days. At the time, I was confident that their words held a great degree of truth to them.
The very next day, while I was using a local library's computer and browsing the internet, I came across a website dedicated to a certain piece of software. It claimed that it could fix up my PC and make it run like new again. I knew, right then, merely from viewing a single page on the website, that it was telling the truth. I cursed myself for not discovering this excellent piece of software before I had taken my PC to the PC repair shop. "It would've saved me money. Oh, well. I'm sure they'll get the job done just fine. I can always use this software in the future to conserve money." Those were my honest thoughts at the time.
Two days later, my phone rang after I returned home from work. I immediately was able to identify the number: it was the PC repair shop's phone number. Once I answered, something strange occurred; the one on the other end of the line spoke, in a small, tormented voice, "Return. Return. Return. Return. Return." No matter what I said to him, he would not stop repeating that one word. Unsettled by this odd occurrence, I traveled to the PC repair shop to find out exactly what happened.
Upon arriving inside the building, I looked upon the shop, which was a shadow of its former self, in shock. There were countless wires all over the floor, smashed computer parts scattered in every direction I looked, fallen shelves on the ground, desks flipped over on the ground, and, to make matters even worse, there was blood splattered all over the wall. Being the reasonable, upstanding, college-educated citizen that I was, I immediately concluded that the current state of the shop was due to none other than an employee's stress from work. I looked around a bit more, spotted three bodies sitting against the wall, and in the middle of the room, I spotted my computer. "Ah. There it is." Directly next to it was the shop's owner, sitting on the ground in the fetal position.
When I questioned him, he kept repeating a single thing again and again: "Cannot be stopped! Cannot be stopped! Cannot be stopped!" I could not get him to tell me what was wrong, but after a bit of pondering, I quickly figured out precisely what happened: they were unable to fix my computer like they had promised. Disgusted by their failure, I turned to the shop's owner (who I now noticed had a gun to his head), and spat in his general direction. I then turned my back to him as
I cut my teeth on the old Mandrake stuff over a decade ago. It had its quirks, but it was a great way to introduce a newbie to Linux. Glad that the code base isn't going away.
Of course, the whole Mandrake/Mandriva story is a sad one in many ways. While Red Hat and SuSE were making money off of support, Mandrake decided to go with education and certification. (This was several years ago, before the name change.) They lost their hineys on it and almost went under then.
Good distribution troubled by a bunch of inexplicably bad business decisions. Just my opinion, anyway.
(Any of my fellow old timers here remember Mandrake 7.0's infamous "Move Your Mouse Wheel!" thing during installation??? Heh. More fun than Duke Nukem getting that thing to work!!!)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
That's a shame - they should have worked out an arrangement w/ Hearst to popularize the character. After all, Mandrake Linux did use all of Mandrake's signature accessories - hat, wand and so on.
Why not just hand over what remains of the distro to Mageia? Not like there's a shortage of redundant distros. Although one thing I wish - that Mandriva/Mageia switch their package manager from rpm to apt. Other than that, it's great - using KDE as its default DE.
Long ago I was one of those people who bought their stock at 2€/share to try to support them. Of course I wrote off that money almost just as long ago. But I still get their nifty french proxy cards (that probably cost more to send than my stock is worth)
Was a complete disaster.
If you ask my opinion, Mandriva had no corporate offerings that actually offered any actual value. Everything server wise you wanted to do to Mandriva could be done with the base Mandriva Linux distribution.
I run an Open Directory Server with:
OpenLDAP + Samba + Kerberos + FreeRadius. On Mandriva Linux. I modified libuser myself to enumerate LDAP accounts. I use Fog for imaging. I use LDAP to administer sudoers, It all works. Mandriva could have taken the Linux Domain controller Market. How? Adding a Widget that said "Create Open Directory Domain" in Mandriva Control Center.
Instead they created this convoluted mess of a service called Mandriva Directory server that complicated everything five or six times. I tried to warn them. They should have handled the creation of Open Directory Servers the same way they handled Open Directory (And Active Directory Clients):
You click on an MMC Widget
The Needed Packages for dhcpd, bind, openldap, samba, kerberos, libuser-ldap, etc etc etc... were all installed, and configurations were written, CLEANLY. Services restart... boom Open Directory Domain.
I filed bugs, I pissed and moaned, my bugs got marked Invalid or won't fix.
FOSS my ass. Same corporate principle; way to go Palm...
This are sad news.
Mandrake was one of my favorite distros, back in the day when it was the only distribution supporting Pentium by default while all others still were targeting x386.
The move to Mandriva was not that successful and made many of us move to other distributions.
It is sad to see they disappear, as I doubt the community will be able to keep it alive.
They should rebrand it as "nandrake" or "sandrake". The "driva" suffix sounds like a combination of "diva" and "drivel".
I just checked, nandrake.com is available.
deeper into the accounts for lees propaganda and
This reminds me of Sun giving over control of OpenOffice.org to the Apache foundation, one year after the community had forked it as LibreOffice. I have the feeling that this is too little too late. Mageia is now where most of the community is. Unfortunately, both distros are almost irrelevant today and are being completely overshadowed by *Ubuntu.
sales and 5o on,
"This costs too much, here you do it."
The community already took control of Mandriva's distro by forking it to Mageia in 2010. Mandriva, as a distro, has seemed almost pointless since then despite some inherent design changes. So, what Mandriva is now proposing seems to be an anachronism.
The nice Mageia distro was born from all the Mandriva uncertainty of the past several years and is about to launch version 2 any day now. Again, Mandriva seems almost pointless, but all the power in the world to people who take them up on their offer.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Please update your list - slackware is dead. No new release in more than a year, the "updated package browser" that was supposed to take a couple of weeks has also been missing in action for more than a year, the server has had many outages (it's currently responds to pings, but no page loads), and the few mirrors don't have much in the way of security and other updates (2 - 3 dozen packages in the last year, depending on the mirror).
I haven't logged in to /. in ages but I couldn't let this crap you have posted go without a comment. Are you simply trolling or do you genuinely believe this? Slackware does not have a set release cycle. It releases WIR (when it is ready). It has often taken more than a year. Look back at its release history and you will see this. To be honest I don't know what "updated package browser" you refer to but if you want to scan available packages use "slackpkg search" like everyone else. The development branch (-current) has received plenty of updates of late and even the latest stable (version 13.37) has had security updates eithin the last month (most recently wicd was upgraded to 1.7.2.4 on the 9th). If you used a mirror that doesn't reflect this, find a better mirror, just like you would with any other distro.
Yes there have been issues with the websever running Slackware but this bears little or no relation to the project itself. People don't receive updates from www.slackware.com, they get them from the various mirrors. These mirrors are generally the same ones hosting other popular distros.
If you want further evidence, see PatVs own comment here on /.:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2816335&cid=39828905
Since May 13 2011 until now, -current has had 728 packages rebuilt, upgraded or added. 435 of those have been within the last 2 months.
My source? http://ftp.uninett.no/linux/slackware/slackware64-current/ChangeLog.txt (a decent mirror if you are looking for one)
The link you provide is equally uninformed since it stated,
"Slackware does not have an apt-get (Ubuntu), portage (Gentoo), or some other variant to allow automatic pulling from an approved repository. Instead, you browse and download .tgz listings and run their pkgtool utility."
Yet it does have such a tool. It is called slackpkg and it is included in the default install. In many ways works slackpkg works just like apt, other than not automatically dealing with dependencies.
When the next release does come out (and it will) perhaps would you care to post back here to admit your mistake. Since I'm guessing it would be a little hard for you to swallow your pride and do it right away
Updates to -current happen in spurts after much internal testing by the core team. Updates to stable happen only if there is a security problem with a packages. The Moz updates are due to security fixes in their releases. Also Slackware itself doesn't have that many packages comparative to distros like Debian. So what you see isn't bad at all and largely expected.
It may come as as shock to you if you use a distro that is forced on a regular release cycle and hence ships with lots of broken packages because it will need constant updates just to get it working. This isn't the same with Slackware. It is stable so needs very few updates, pretty much security only. That is one of Slackware's primary benefits. Your problem appears to be ignorance.
LibreOffice is not included in Slackware's official repositories, so you are just talking crap there. The most popular third party repository is SlackBuilds It has the latest version: http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.37/office/libreoffice/
Your obsession with this online 'package browser' is slighlty odd. It is just a contributed nicity. Not an official part of the project. If you want to search the contents you use slackpkg (like a Debian/Ubuntu user would use apt-cache or apt-file). If you don't have Slackware installed yet, look at the MANIFEST and FILELIST files within the directory structure on your mirror of choice.
As a side note, SUSE used to have a site called Webpin that allowed you to search through the contents of packages. There is even a Webpin menu item in YaST (SUSE's official package manager). Then out of the blue around openSUSE 11.4, Webpin stopped working and was no longer maintained. Yet even in openSUSE 12.1 the menu item is still listed.
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/applications/458432-webpin-non-functionnal-suse-11-4-a.html
So tell me, do you go around claiming that SUSE is dying as well?
It does receive security updates, you have admitted as much yourself. Perhaps you could back your claims up by listing a package found in the stable that is known to be insecure. Have fun searching.
You're missing a LOT of the main points here.
# 1. I made a direct comparison to Mandriva, another distro that is in financial straits, not a "we have 28,0000 packages on 9 dvds" like debian. Mandriva issues security updates almost daily. Slackware? Months can go by.
The comparison with Mandriva is apt, because both Slackware and Mandriva are dvds, so they're more or less within the ballpark in terms of being comparable. In other words, I made an apples-to-apples comparison, not the apples-to-oranges you tried to make it out to be when you just threw Debian into the mix (BTW, I *never* mentioned Debian).
So, your claim that "Updates to stable happen only if there is a security problem with a packages (sic)." is simply bogus, since even that doesn't happen in a timely fashion.
# 2. Slackware (the site) being dead was barely noticed because nobody is using it. Same with the non-existent package browser. Nobody is using it.
Sure, slackware still has numbers on distrowatch - but those are people who look, not people who download and install. People who did like I did - downloaded the dvd then realized that slack has turned into a zombie distro - aren't users.
You keep on saying that slackware is stable. Dead is also a stable state, so in that sense you may be right.
# 3. Again, wrt "Updates to stable happen only if there is a security problem with a packages (sic)." Funny how you try to claim that slackware is stable, and only needs to keep up with security updates between releases, when not only does it NOT keep up with security updates, but among the few updates, the biggest was updating Moz/FF, not for any particular security bug, but because of their release schedule.
# 4. Who is going to recommend a distro that can't even keep their web site up for days, never mind weeks at a time? When you're of the net, you're dead to the world. To allow this situation to go on for so long is a sign of incompetence, same as having a package browser that for a year now says "in a few days."
How you can turn around and say "So what you see isn't bad at all and largely expected"? It's a disaster. The only thing that mitigated it to some extent is that nobody notices slackware any more except to ask the question "Is slackware dead (again)?"
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Using multiple sockpuppet accounts on /. on your end trolling scumbag that u are barbara.hudson@unjava.com from http://slashdot.org/~Barbara%2C+not+Barbie = barbara.hudson@barbara-hudson.com from http://slashdot.org/~tomhudson ? We know you do that crap. Are you that pathetic? Seems to be so. How many more registered luser sockpuppet accounts do you keep around for trolling others, modding yourself up and others downward with, and for "supporting yourself" too, pig? Isn't it bad enough you have 1 eye only cyclops, and live alone with dogs (because no man wants you), but you also want to be known as a sockpuppet using troll too?
Using multiple sockpuppet accounts on /. on your end trolling scumbag that u are barbara.hudson@unjava.com from http://slashdot.org/~Barbara%2C+not+Barbie = barbara.hudson@barbara-hudson.com from http://slashdot.org/~tomhudson ? We know you do that crap. Are you that pathetic? Seems so. How many more registered luser sockpuppet accounts do you keep around for trolling others, modding yourself up and others downward with, and for "supporting yourself" too, pig? Isn't it bad enough you have 1 eye only cyclops, and live alone with dogs (because no man wants you), but you also want to be known as a sockpuppet using troll too?
Using multiple sockpuppet accounts on /. on your end trolling scumbag that u are barbara.hudson@unjava.com from http://slashdot.org/~Barbara%2C+not+Barbie = barbara.hudson@barbara-hudson.com from http://slashdot.org/~tomhudson ? We know you do that crap.
Are you that pathetic? Seems so.
How many more registered luser sockpuppet accounts do you keep around for trolling others, modding yourself up and others downward with, and for "supporting yourself" too, pig? Isn't it bad enough you have 1 eye only cyclops, and live alone with dogs (because no man wants you), but you also want to be known as a sockpuppet using troll too?
This is what happens when you don't listen to the community. I had been in an out of this distro for years. What attracted me to it was its ease of use and pretty graphics. What drove me away is very little worked and each patch level would bring a whole new round of troubles.