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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.'"

3 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. 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.