Mandriva Up For Sale

The French company that creates and sells the Mandriva Linux distribution is up for sale. The news about Mandriva SA originally surfaced on a French Mandriva portal, and was confirmed by one of the potential buyers. Mandriva the distribution is a merger of the former MandrakeLinux and Conectiva distros. Mandriva the company is no stranger to hard times, having sought bankruptcy protection in the past.

Re:But...

[Intron]

You're thinking of CentOS. Mandriva is a separately maintained distro. It takes a lot of work to test and package a distro.

Translated Article

[Freshly Exhumed]

With Google Translate we can see that the MLO site [mandrivalinux-online.org] is reporting that Mandriva, [google.com]
the French/Brazilian Linux distribution publisher, soon may not be able to meet payroll. Two potential buyers (LightApp [lightapp.com] from the UK, Linagora [linagora.com] from France) have apparently stepped forward to look at buying the entire company or parts of it.

To me it would be a pity if Mandriva ceased to exist as we know it. The distribution is one of the best out there for polish and
attention to detail, and would be a good corporate buy based on that alone. I've always felt that it would be a great "house"
Linux version for a big player like Dell, HP, etc. but clearly there are factors stopping such computer companies or other Linux
distributors from buying it.

Oh well, if they cannot make it then that's the way it goes...

Re:But...

[betterunixthanunix]

Mandriva forked from Red Hat many years ago, and has really been independent since then. They employ something like 70 people, and they do actually sell shrink wrapped packages (last I checked), and they have servers and advertising to pay for. The real problem is that they never had a firm grip on their market (the desktop Linux market, which is admittedly a difficult market to really get a firm grip on) and they could not compete with Canonical's magic money supply.

Re:Translated Article

[ianare]

Looks like Linagora has confirmed ongoing negotiations ...

http://www.mandrivalinux-online.org/news/news-0-88+mandriva-a-vendre-linagora-confirme.php [mandrivalinux-online.org]