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Mandriva SA Cedes Control To Mandriva Community

Posted by Soulskill on from the and-we-didn't-get-anything-for-you dept.

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.'"

11 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. And THERE'S The Value of FOSS by smpoole7 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:And THERE'S The Value of FOSS by dragonquest · · Score: 5, Informative

      They can't go back to Mandrake because they lost the case to Hearst who own the Mandrake comic strips.

      Mandriva History about name change

      --
      "Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time."
    2. Re:And THERE'S The Value of FOSS by arth1 · · Score: 2

      IIRC, the underlying reason for the name change was that King Features Syndicate rattled their sabers - the combination of the name Mandake combined with magic related icons and graphics was a clear reference to the comic.

      Now that Mandriva's Mandrake trademark has been abandoned, other companies may have used it (sans magic references), so it may be hard to go back.

    3. Re:And THERE'S The Value of FOSS by hendridm · · Score: 2

      Oh, and about the summary... isn't it correctly spelled "arbitrary"? what's up with that?

      It should be "arbitrarily". Adverb, not adjective.

    4. Re:And THERE'S The Value of FOSS by jbolden · · Score: 2

      As I recall, though, the reason it was a dumb move (again, my opinion) was because what people were looking for was Red Hat Certification. If you'd paid and passed a Mandrake course, it was hard to imagine getting a job off of that. But everyone had heard of Red Hat.

      That Red Hat certification was for server. Mandrake's certification program was directed at companies that were using Mandrake and wanted certified administrators. I don't know if they existed.

      When I talk about education I mean the actual initiatives in France primarily involving selling to primary and secondary schools partnering with educational software vendors. Not professional education.

      As for desktop Linux, that's an old argument that has been rehashed here a million times. Again, who knows? If Microsoft hadn't been so dominant (and hadn't so actively crushed anything that looked like competition), I think Mandrake might have been a contender.

      I agree. Mandrake had a great desktop system to grow from. Had their been an opportunity they well positioned. Once XP was successful in moving the home crowd over to the NT kernel, it made sense to go after niches.

  2. Mandrake, Mandriva, Mageia by unixisc · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:Mandrake, Mandriva, Mageia by arth1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      What, and be even less distinguishable from all the "redundant distros", most of which are Debian based?

      With Mandrake drawing its last breaths, and uncertainty on whether Attachmate is going to do more with SuSE than keeping it on life support while milking the last drops, there aren't many independent distros left (ones that don't depend on an upstream distro), and that is sad.
      Fedora[*], Slackware, Debian, Arch, Gentoo - that's about it?
      Most of the rest seem to be dependent distros or narrow niche products.

      [*]: I'd say Red Hat, but these days Red Hat is mostly based off Fedora, not the other way around. Patches often flow in the opposite direction, though; support contracts tend to cut down on the WONTFIX or ignoring.

    2. Re:Mandrake, Mandriva, Mageia by Barbara,+not+Barbie · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Fedora[*], Slackware, Debian, Arch, Gentoo - that's about it?

      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).

      --
      Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
  3. Mandriva Directory Server by Zombie+Ryushu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Community did this already in 2010... by Freshly+Exhumed · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  5. Bullshit! Slackware is very much alive by grandmofftarkin · · Score: 2

    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