It seems that the previous news about Mandriva SA being for sale have been more than simple rumors. Frederic Cuif* (incorrectly unaccented due to limitations in our CMS), active member of the French-speaking Mandriva User Group has summed up the various outcomes and proposed projects he found after contacting several key members of the company in order to gather information. The result of his investigation can be found on his blog, along with a detailed analysis of the Mandriva business model and the proposed outcomes, from a renewed interest in the distribution and the community from Linagora, potential buyer, to what could be the end of the Mandriva adventure if nothing is done. (Thanks to everybody who submitted this)
There are many aspects here that are simply difficult for me to understand as an outsider to the Mandriva community so I checked the history of articles on Mandriva at OSnews (it pays to have an old database). Frédéric mentions financial problems in 2003:
Just want to recall that Mandriva is having financial problems for years. On January 13, 2003, the company management has declared a cessation of payments, which meant it was no longer able to meet its liabilities with available assets.
A few days after that date, OSnews posted this story about the bankruptcy. This press release on the Mandrake site from the Way Back Machine points out that it’s a chapter 11 filing, allowing the company to restructure its assets (as noted by Frédéric in his blog, following the quoted paragraph).
It appears as if it has only been down hill since then, and Mandriva is apparently struggling to reach a sale to secure its future. Interestingly Frédéric mentions surprising recent events:
A recent « leak » (although I don’t know if it really was unintentional or not, because it can be a way to get interest of potential buyers) of a report of the Board of Mandriva has publicly revealed that discussions were underway between the direction of the company and two companies: Lightapp and Linagora.
I have had no information on the draft Lightapp by Arnaud Laprévote, so I can not comment this project. Regarding Linagora the interest shown by Alexander Zapolsky [director at Linagora] for Mandriva is not new, a first attempt failed in 2007.
These last days, the projects have emerged and tensions were very high among employees of Mandriva.
By “project”, I believe he is saying “business plan”, the blog post is in difficult to understand English as it must be a second language to him.
The large French open-source services company Linagora appears to be the best candidate to buy Mandriva and get them out of their troubles.
Linagora is a company known in the open source software world where profits are more important than Mandriva, although, I agree, main activity is not the same. For Alexander Zapolsky, Mandriva must go back as one of the first Linux distribution and get back its image erased by years of poor management and competition filled the room left by Mandriva.
By “where profits are more important than Mandriva” he may mean that Linagora has a more stable financial backing than Mandriva and/or that it is more profit-driven than a community focus in the current Mandriva. Frédéric details the two-fold business plan of Lingura: Community and Business.
Regarding the community, Alexander Zapolsky would like to go back to the fundamentals of the philosophy of free software and offer a « free free » in his words: open source software and free. The commercial products such as Flash or Powerpack are « supposed » to disappear because of too low profits and proprietary software packages asking for license fees (like DVD player) would be available on an online store. On this last point, Oliver and I are speaking with Alexander Zapolsky as we disagree. We believe that these products deserve to be kept with some important modifications, particularly to allow Mrs Michu [French colloquialism for “Mrs. Jones”, as in “The Jones’”] to have a computer that works « out of the box » (PWP) or maintain a technological product that is sold little because few highlighted (Flash).
The aim of Alexander Zapolsky is for him to simplify the Mandriva offer (which is a good thing) and make more reliable products focusing even more on integration. The main lines of the distribution will still be proposed by the community and led by the company and because of that, he wants to give more importance to Cooker to promote development around the distribution.
I cannot seem to fully understand what is implied here under the business side of things.
In business part of his plan, Alexander Zapolsky wishes melt [meld?] some of its products as those with OBM or LinID Mandriva (Pulse, etc..), as they are complementary and could therefore be renamed to reveal the fusion of the two entities. The advantage of having a distribution in its area of expertise can offer a complete offer to customers of « Mandragora » (this is not a final name but one to be used in discussion), all vertical from distribution to the application. Quality of products developped by Mandriva is seen as standards compliant and Alexander Zapolsky wanted to keep the Brazilian part of Mandriva, which is definitely a strong point of this project further.
I believe he is trying to say that Linagora could be looking to provide a vertical platform where they can control both the OS and the apps (their current business), and thus improve the quality of their offering.
Frédéric is essentially saying that Linagora represent the best opportunity for Mandriva and that a certain level of (brace yourself) synergy is present, as well as an interest in the community and philosophical aspects of open source coming from Linagora, where as “the other [potential buyers] just wanted to use Mandriva as a springboard to promote something else (enter the free market in particular) and the social aspect was sometimes nonexistent according to our sources.”
What will the outcome be? The future is not certain yet, but Frédéric is concerned that as the board of directors on both sides argue for a mutual agreement, the real people who matter are being left out of the loop.
The future of the employees seems to play no part inside, and [anger] is growing internally. The community is, too, listening and solution that does not adequately preserve its commitment to the distribution could cause a visceral reaction and lead to a fork to empty the company of its substance and fork Mandriva Linux.
Let’s hope the future is bright for Mandriva Linux! Please provide any corrections and insight you may have in the comments as I may have made mistakes in this article given my lack of knowledge on Mandriva, thanks.
What happens when an open source company goes bankrupt?
Regarding this:
Wouldn’t it be easy for someone just hire these guys and create yet another linux distro from the open source parts of mandriva, just ejecting the copyrighted stuff like artwork?
Or perhas Canonical should hire them to take care of Kubuntu?
How do you pay to hire the people? Hemorrhaging money isn’t a business plan.
Well, maybe if you need the tax writeoff
Besides, not all businesses guarantee a profit – not-for-profit corporations can also have a business plan and the goal doesn’t have to be “make money”.
Not for profits still have to break even somehow. =)
No thanks, Kubuntu is already better than Madriva. I’d hate to see anything like drakconf in it.
No thanks, Kubuntu is already better than Madriva. I’d hate to see anything like drakconf in it.
Now I’m curious: what’s wrong with drakconf?
That it exists at all? It bugs me tremendously that it’s completely separate from the KDE system settings. I just don’t see the point in drakconf’s existence as a separate. And why is drakconf a GTK app anyway?
KDE system settings are related to KDE. You can configure everything about KDE there. In order to get drakconf, you’ve got to understand the difference between “the system” and “the desktop”. Drakconf is about configuring “the system”.
In Pardus Linux, there’s a “System” group of icons in Kconfig which includes pardus-provided tools, and it just works…
It works but uses kdelibs. If you use GNOME or awesome it sucks.
Then you do like ubuntu and put your custom tools in GTK form in the settings menu. As far as I know, there is no way around making one frontend per toolkit on linux…
Edited 2010-06-19 22:05 UTC
Ubuntu does not have custom tools. Ubuntu is an excellent distro, but saying it has better configuration tools than Mandriva is just stupid.
I like drakconf because everything is integrated in one panel, it works on the command line and it parses the text files so you can modify them directly if you wish. Ubuntu has nothing like that.
Well, there’s Jockey, the usb installer, and the repository chooser. Plus they tweaked the Appearance panel.
Most packages (NVidia driver, CompizConfig…) put their tools in the config menus on a GNOME desktop. Apart from their confusing naming (“Per-user” and “System-wide” would be better in my opinion), there’s nothing wrong with them as long as they don’t get too much cluttered…
Sorry but I did not say that. I just described how config tools could be integrated in a GNOME desktop, instead of being left to a separate app.
It has the gnome config menu, like it or not this is the way GNOME works. Though you’re right that a unified command line config tool would be nice.
The sole thing which drakxconf offered, which I really needed, and which wasn’t available elsewhere is the ability to disable pulseaudio on the fly. Every distro which includes this horrible stuff should provide a setting like that…
(double post)
Edited 2010-06-19 05:18 UTC
If you had tried Mandriva, you would know that you can choose not to use drakconf. You can modify the underlying configuration files directly just like in kubuntu and it won’t break anything. Drakconf can even work with your hand modified files.
Someone preferring Kubuntu over Mandriva, that is a first. Never heard that before. But I suspect you didn’t try and don’t know what you are talking about.
I don’t see what’s so great about Mandriva really and yes I have used it. I even have it installed right now. La Ora is the ugliest god-damn default theme since Keramic (which is rather odd really considering that the wallpaper is beautiful) and that network control center they have is about as good as all the custom vendor wireless control applications for Windows (that is, not good at all but actually rather awful). OpenOffice looks like the devils ass warmed over since they don’t include the OOo KDE integration.
Using Pulseaudio by default with KDE isn’t the greatest idea ever either. Thankfully you can easily disable it (hey!, a good use for drakconf. Who’d thunk it?). The package manager is just terrible, just like OpenSUSE’s. Hey, kpackagekit might have some rough spots but it’s still better to use.
And why is it that the default browser is Firefox and not Konqueror?
Also, what’s with all the GTK apps? I thought Mandriva was a KDE distro? What gives?
But hey, people like it and it’s obviously suits them fine. I just don’t see why so many people always put forward Mandriva (and OpenSuse) as the best KDE distros and I certainly don’t see why so many loathe Kubuntu.
Probably personal taste. Also the fact that they don’t have any real KDE developer.
BWAHAHAHAAHAH…. No, seriously… What? Is there anything really that Kubuntu excels at or that sets it apart from other distros other than the fact that it has got to be buggiest KDE distro in existence?
I am not trying to start a distro flame fest but if you really feel that Kubuntu is better than $INSERT_DISTRO you need serious help!
Good job on the not starting a flame war thing and not using personal insults. I fail to take your useless comment seriously.
….. and by “take care of” I hope you mean putting it out of it’s misery.
They could take over the entire Kubuntu operation – Mandriva has the best KDE implementation (and I’ve tried OpenSuse, Fedore, Kubuntu) of the point-and-click distroes. At least for the past few releases it’s been stable, fast and appealing. You’ll see glowing reviews of their past few releases (including Mandriva/GNOME reviews – so they really seem to give equal love to both desktop environments).
No, actually I would be really sad to see Mandriva gone – I think it has built a good reputation in the past few years, problem is, they didn’t take advantage of it. I believe poor marketing, confusing product lines, confusing website (it got better recently though) and the general lack of focus (they try to do EVERYTHING from servers to linux on a flash drive) all contributed to their current situation.
I know that every single year from 2000 was supposed to be the year of the linux desktop, but I believe now we are getting really closer to that. We have brand new devices coming to the consumer market, or sporting different UIs (from WebOS on HP tablets to Android and ChromeOS) – this will change people’s perceptions. The PC=Microsoft WIndows has been ingrained deeply for over a decade, and that was the main hurdle for linux adoptation. The lack of knowledge that there is something outside the MS world on a consumer level, and the lack of know-how on the corporate level. By the latter I mean experience on the part of vendors to work with the community to provide solutions – many vendors tried to do integration work themselves resulting in a crappy experience (Dell, Asus, etc.). As far as I can tell, Linagora has experience in system integration, while mandriva has the tools and the community – I agree that this might be the best way forward to them.
Not only Kubuntu. Mandriva — unlike Canonical — has actual operating system (kernel, Xorg,…) developers.
If Canonical took over Mandriva (which I doubt, btw) Canonical could suddenly fix their own bugs instead of filing its bugs into Red Hat’s bug tracker: http://airlied.livejournal.com/72817.html
why don’t you fix your CMS to deal with accented characters? it’s happened a few times and is a bit silly that this is a bug these days, especially for such a technically advanced news site like this.
Fixing code and publishing news happens on two different schedules.
Yeah why fix something thats been broke forever? Then what will with OSNews folk post when any time some ‘outter country fella’ does something in the computer world? Crazy Kids and your new fangled ISO layouts! Forget this! I’m going back to 1983 when we didn’t have no stinkin dead keys!
Yeah why fix something thats been broke forever? Then what will with OSNews folk post when any time some ‘outter country fella’ does something in the computer world? Crazy Kids and your new fangled ISO layouts! Forget this! I’m going back to 1983 when we didn’t have no stinkin dead keys!
I have to agree to a degree with this person here: OSNews being a geek site aimed squarely at other geeks yet the inability of using UTF8 just gives a pretty unprofessional feeling. I have no idea what their code is like and what language they’re using, but I still doubt it’d be much work to convert the system to use UTF8 through and through.
Unprofessional like all the editors and even the web developer being part time volunteers who get nothing out of the site than rage from users?
We are unprofessional, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s one of the good things about the site. Ignore the niggles like UTF-8 and look at how the site has managed to stand apart from the mainstream.
True geeks treat everything above 7-bit ascii with extreme caution. It’s always going to break *something*.
They may not be my current personal choice or go-to distribution for new users but I spent a lot of time with Mandriva Free until a few years ago. Hopefully managing a two stage community/commercial process keeps them around. They are the original “user friendly” distribution to focus on average users.
I know Gael Duval (original founder of Mandrake/Mandriva) is no longer apart of the company, but I am curious to know his thoughts and feelings regarding what his distribution (or his baby so-to-speak) is going through.
Having said that, does anyone know whatever happened to his Ulteo project? I haven’t heard any news about it since it was introduced. A quick look around the ulteo website doesn’t provide any sense of recent (or old for that matter) activity. Anyone use/used it?
Update: Further investigation shows that Ulteo is current and active. I guess I didn’t look hard enough the first time. It’s a Virtual Desktop and Application server. I still am curious to know what Gael thinks of all of this.
Edited 2010-06-15 23:51 UTC
The problem for Mandriva is, it doesn’t really have a niche where it fits. It tries to be everything for everybody and in the end isn’t that great for anybody. It had its time, but the good times have been over for several years now. Whenever I tried Mandriva during the last three years, I was disappointed. Too buggy and unpolished compared to the other big commercial players: Ubuntu/Canonical, (Open)Suse/Novell and RedHat.
I also have the feeling, that the community isn’t that great anymore. I haven’t checked in a while, but documentation was organized very confusingly for a long time.
Maybe Novell or RedHat might buy them for their customer list.
Spot on!
I used mandriva when I was waiting for 2.6.27 to make it into Debian for something to do in the mean time and the only thing that stood out was how much it doesn’t stand out.
It tries to be everything for everybody and in the end isn’t that great for anybody.
That’s odd. I’ve used Mandriva for several years now and I have not found any other distro worth using. Like f.ex. I’ve always ran into major bugs and issues when trying out Ubuntu, and I really really dislike how they’ve relaxed the system security in order to please the less-technical audience. And Fedora? Well, for some reason it feels a whole lot slower then Mandriva, and whenever I tried to run anything in Wine the SELinux system coughed and crashed both. No thanks :S
I second that, for the past 3 or maybe 4 releases at least, Mandriva has been the best desktop OS, especially when it comes to KDE. I know that they have a very good GNOME offer too – overall, a really well balanced distribution. It might not be the fastest (well, according to some synthetic benchmarks on Phoronix at least), it might not be the most up-to-date(usually you have to wait a few weeks longer for the latest to arrive in the repos than you would with Kubuntu, OpenSuse or Fedora) – but the packages at least were very stable when they arrived.
I beg to differ. None of these excellent products have something as advanced and complete as the draktools.
Ubuntu/Canonical is very basic and does not provide the tools for desktop users. They rely on gnome, although gnome configuration tools are only related to gnome. The result is that the few configuration tools available are scattered all around the place and users are confused.
RedHat is excellent on support for servers but it does not cut it on the desktop where users don’t like to play with man pages and the command line.
(Open)Suse/Novell is almost there but Yast is still not on par with the draktools.
I’m not really a fan of the kitchensink approach of Yast and DrakeConf. I like the old Unix philosophy of small tools that do one job right better. In my experience it’s easier to edit one configuration file once in a while.
This depends on usage of course. I know that there are lots of fans of these kinds of config software. It definetely has its users. I haven’t missed it in Ubuntu so far.
Is it still the case, that Mandriva offers only support for two years after a release? That can be awfully short for bigger deployments. Canonical’s LTS approach could be a way for Mandriva to please Admins.
I really like their PowerPack btw. If Canonical would offer something like that, I would buy it.
Actually, the draktools are a collection of small tools. Drakconf is the glue between them. The good thing about the draktools is that they don’t overwrite your config files. You can still edit them directly and the draktools will work with that. In my experience, some tasks are easier to do with the draktools, even if I still edit files directly when I feel it is quicker. For instance managing services without a tool for that would be very cumbersome.
This point has been raised in the idea box:
http://ideas.mandriva.com/en/idees/show.php?id=194
http://ideas.mandriva.com/en/idees/show.php?id=81
This is a good idea in my opinion. Some people feel this need is filled by Mandriva corporate desktop and that supporting LTS releases for a small number of non-paying users would cost too much. In theory it could work if there are enough paying users. Currently, Mandriva’s biggest problem is finance.
Yes it has! Mandrive (as far as I have been able to find out) is the only distro for those with a GMA 500 graphic board but limited knoledge about getting things to work in Linux.
http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/other-distributions/15340-mandriva-…
It sure as hell doesn’t work in Arch, *buntu or any other distro I’ve tried. *buntu have a third party solution ( https://edge.launchpad.net/gma500 ) that’s in alpha stage and works for 2d, somehow, but that’s a modified version of Mandrakes solution thet just plain work, from what I hear.
I, myself use Ubuntu with the solution linked to above, but I was a a couple of years Mandrake/Mandriva member once upon the time, so I’ve had enough of it, to be honest
./nalle.
I’m thinking specifically of PCLinuxOS.
I could be mistaken, but isn’t PClinuxOS based on Mandriva? If this is the case, how many others are based on this distro? Can the demise of one distro take out a number of others or is it relatively straight forward for them to refocus and use another distro as a new base going forward?
I use PCLinuxOS and would be gutted if it went down the tubes due to a reliance on someone else.
Maybe a bit selfish but they’re fair questions.
Cheers.
I’ve read somewhere (maybe even here on OSNews) that PCLinuxOS 2010 is no longer based on Mandriva, though it uses some of Mandriva’s tools.
I don’t know one.
Mandriva has made huge profits over more than a decade. I’m not talking about financial profit, but about fun and productivity profit. Since it forked Red Hat, the profit for the desktop Linux has been HUGE. Mandriva has been leading the way and showing the path for a very long time now. No other distro has made so much profit for Linux on the desktop. Sadly, this has never translated into financial profit.
Now if Mandriva would cease to exist, we may loose much more than an excellent distro (perhaps the best for the desktop).
Indeed, Mandriva is much more than a distro. They also contribute a lot in upstream projects like Linux and KDE. If Mandriva stops contributing, all distros will loose.
Now if Mandriva would cease to exist, we may loose much more than an excellent distro
I really hope it doesn’t come to that :/ I just don’t know of any other distro I’d like to migrate to :/
Slackware? Arch?
Me started with Mandrake too in 1998 (actually with Corel Linux but only briefly) but found I learned a lot more when progressing to other distros.
Slackware? Arch?
I haven’t tried either of those, could give a whirl to them. But I have this image that they’re a tad more high-maintenance distros than f.ex. Mandriva, and after having used Gentoo for years before I moved to Mandriva I am not really interested in high-maintenance anymore :/
Mandriva was the second distro i used after getting into Linux and i really enjoyed the experience.
But now i feel that its lost its appeal. I to am a Gentoo user, still holding onto it on one of my machines. The other two run Ubuntu.
I sometimes try Mandriva when a new release pops up, but i never keep it much. The reason for that is simple: you have limited configuration options(compared to gentoo) and it lacks the polish and the community of Ubuntu.
Arch is rolling release and there are plenty of updates every few days and some breakage on occasion. That said you don’t have to apply them but may get problems updating later if you stay too far behind. Seems similar to Gentoo to me but you don’t compile everything, so it’s probably a bit less work.
Slackware is a lot more stable in terms of maintenance and updates once you have set it up. You only get the few security updates from the repo, and contrary to perception you don’t have to dl and install them ‘manually’, slackpkg or slapt-get can do that for you when the repositories have been set up.
Then it’s only a matter of keeping track of the few packages you installed yourself. For me that’s Virtualbox and codecs that don’t really change much. These days Slackware even comes with mplayer.
Or for an easier start SalixOS, which is a trimmed down but original Slackware at heart, with codecs and a few extra tools to manage users and locales and other stuff, something you will appreciate being used to Drakconf, although of course it’s not on the same scale.
I did a brief review a while ago, you can find it here
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20100301 .
One can also use Salix repositories with Slackware to get stuff like vlc or limewire. Their repos support dependency resolution.
//End of advert//
Cheers.
The part in bold has always looked true for me. That’s one of the reasons why I’m leaving my current job: you’re not the boss so your voice is just a low whisper-like white noise in the far background, even when speaking the truth. And when it turns out you were true and mention it, all you’ll hear is “it’s easy to say now ‘I said so'”.
Correction: his name should be “Frédéric” with a ‘r’ after the ‘F’… as we don’t have “Fédéric” (without the ‘r’) as a common first name here. Thinking of how parents seem to avoid conventional names, it probably exists but I’d never heard/read that spelling previously.
And yes, I do confirm that his English is a bit hard to understand. I probably had an easier time than Kroc because I could make the literal translation back into French but not that easy either. Yes, English is a very foreign language to most French speakers living in France… quite appallingly in fact.
But I’m lenient because I also have a problem with where to place the adverbs (“I usually dance” can be either “Usually I dance” or “I dance usually” in literal French), and the prepositions in verbal phrases that have an object (classic mistake: “turned on/off sth” vs “turned sth on/off” but also “take sth down” vs “take down sth”). We don’t have these in French: the speaker chooses where to put the adverb and the number of prepositions is much lower. For instance, “on”, “upon” and “over” are all translated by “sur”.
Some of Mandriva’s problem is really their own doing. At one time as a Linux advocate I was trying to get as many frustrated Windows users over to Linux as many as I can. This was right around the time when Red Hat made a big fuss about protecting their trademark which hindered the distribution of their desktop os in both iso and as well as physical media. They soon dropped out of desktop Linux market altogether.
Of course Mandrake was a natural alternative at the time since it was closest cousin to Red Hat. Soon after I started distributing Mandriva, I had their lawyers come after me for promoting and distributing their free version of the product. Apparently Mandriva had an advertisement clause in the end user license agreement that was very similar to XFree86. We all know how that worked out for XFree86. I guess they made the free version available because they were contractually obligated to do so under GPL but they didn’t want people actually using it or distributing it. My guess is that they didn’t want users who are using the free version to call into Mandriva asking for help.
The advertisement clause basically said that if I was to distribute a copy of the free version, I was required to include a Mandriva free version logo, a big paragraph of text that explained that this was free version and that Mandriva offered a paid version, and a long url where user can buy the paid version. That doesn’t sound all that bad but the wording of the advertisement clause paragraph made it sound like the free version was just a trial software and that it was not entirely legal to run the free version indefinitely. It turns out having this sort of advertisement clause is in fact violation of GPL. A group that focused on enforcing GPL did agree with me on this but they really didn’t do anything about it. I tried to work with Mandriva lawyer on this issue but it didn’t go anywhere. I ended up dropping Mandriva from my list recommended Linux distribution because of this. Soon after Ubuntu came along and I moved on from Mandriva.
That is weird. I have distributed Mandriva/Mandrake CD for more than a decade and didn’t even know Mandriva had a lawyer. Especially in the Mandrake days. Actually I’m pretty sure they didn’t have a lawyer or that lawyer was a fucking idiot not to alert them about Mandrake the Magician. With 10 employees or so, I’m curious how they found out about you distributing their CD “illegally”. If you distributed them by the millions, how come I have never heard about you?
Linux on the storm
Linux on the storm
Into this house we’re born
Into this world we’re thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out alone
Linux on the storm…
Edited 2010-06-17 19:56 UTC
Don’t you have a haiku too?
Sadly, Jim Morrison was not so good at them
It’s a shame, the other one was nice.
I wish them well. Mandrake 8.2 was my first Linux distro.
I’ve started using linux with Mandrake. I’ve used it for a number of years with pleasure. When I used ubuntu for a school project I wanted to switch to gnome and the overall experience wasn’t that good with gnome on Mandrake. That made me switch to ubuntu, but from time to time I do miss features like their configuration tools.
Last year I tried the new Mandriva desktop for a week or so and it certainly felt very good. I hope that they won’t disappear, because I might change back in the future.
there is a consolidation of linux distros coming now that google is making everyone else look like idiots playing with toys