Shareholder Fight Threatens Mandriva SA 193
LinuxScribe writes "A shareholder fight (French [Google translation]) has put one of the oldest commercial Linux vendors at risk of shuttering on January 16. If Mandriva can't raise 4 million euro in capital by then, it will have no choice but to cease operations."
It's a damn shame (Score:5, Informative)
I was a Mandrake/Mandriva guy for years. Before Ubuntu, it was THE "newbie" distro. It's still very user-friendly.
Once all this uncertainty started about a year ago, I switched to Mageia [mageia.org], which is a community fork of Mandrake.
A translation of the letter. (Score:5, Informative)
The phrasing in that letter is kind of torturous and very flowery, and Google translate misses in a few spots.. (But does shockingly well over all.)
Here's a slightly cleaner translation (my own):
To the associates and directors of Bryan Garnier:
Mr. Olivier Garnier De Falletans,
In this letter, we wish to bring to your attention the extreme gravity of the situation which we believe ourselves, as employees of Mandriva, to be the victims.
We are determined to no longer sit back and endure this situation passively.
In less than four weeks, our company could be effectively forced to file for bankruptcy and cease all activities because its indispensable recapitilization has been two times prevented by Linlux SARL, and this even though Townarea Trading & Investment Ltd, our other majority shareholder, was inclined to support entirely the cost, an amount of 4,000,000 euro.
Now, Linux SARL, an organization which seems to be under your control and that of Mr. Marc Goldberg, your employee and manager, had itself no financial obligation and therefore could not be but a beneficiary of this salvage operation.
The refusal which was offered by Linlux SARL to all the propositions made during the general assemblies of September 30th and December 5th 2011 is and remains for us absolutely incomprehensible and absolutely unjustifiable.
There are no less and no more than 45 direct jobs between Paris, Brasil, our external personnel, and all the indirect jobs at our subcontractors and suppliers.
In addition, following a reorganization already in progress, the operations in Brasil are almost breaking even, and a new business plan lays out the reorientation of the business with solid prospects for growth for next year.
Very worried for the future of our company, we ask you please to immediately reconsider a decision, which will turn out not only extremely negative for our and your future, but also for that of the world of free software in Europe.
While waiting for your prompt decision, we hope you will accept, Ms, Mr., our sincere regards.
Re:A translation of the letter. (Score:4, Informative)
French is one of the easier (easiest?) languages to translate into English. After the colonization of England by the French, the language was left with many words which haven't changed substantially in meaning from the original French, enough to form a fairly complete vocabulary. In fact, one can get by quite well in English without using too many anglo-saxon words. Moreover, the logical structure of the French grammar is a bonus for machine translation algorithms. It's harder to translate English into French, actually.
Re:Just install the big grand-daddy of them all (Score:5, Informative)
I'd say that if anything's the grand-daddy - it's Red Hat.
Bitch, please! [slackware.com] ;)
Re:Suse is in on the carnage (Score:2, Informative)
http://linuxpr.com/releases/2749.html is an indication that the people pulling the strings through Linux SARL are actually Suse......
No shit, Sherlock.
Y2K called and would like its press release back [lwn.net], please.
Re:Just install the big grand-daddy of them all (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just install the big grand-daddy of them all (Score:3, Informative)
THIS. I've been an AC here since before Caldera Linux existed. I believe, Debian is bar-none the most stable usable distro.It's what pulled me from BSD to Linux.
Um you realise Debian is also KFreeBSD right?
The only problem with Debian is the current influx of Ewebuntards (not saying you're one of them) flooding the lists and forums with stupidity and "demands". Suddenly it's a right to swear and be downright offensive while demanding that Unstable Gnome/XFCE or whatever DE they want - stay exactly as it was. Gnome3/KDE4/PulseAudio is evil, it's too hard - but we DEMAND it run on our phone/fondle slab/SandyBridge so we can update our bling on a daily basis - but IT MUST STAY THE SAME (and support their proprietary hardware, and Flash). After all - Free Open Source Software is all about the "user" right? (sigh).
It was bad enough weeding out all the #!/Mint/Sidux/Ubuntu users pretending to run Debian and demanding developer drop everything now and get their week old multifunction printer/scanner/fax machine talking to Facebook - but now the fuckers *are* actually using Debian. Last month - they used KDE, then dumped it like lemming because all the old documentation they love for KDE3.5 is wrong, then the same thing with Gnome, now its XFCE.
The thing they don't get about Debian is that "it" doesn't have plans to dominate the desktop - just be a reliable source of packages that can be assembled by non-lazy people to build whatever they want.
Glad you're liking Debian - hope you stick around and hope you're one of those people who understand that we give our time because we like what we create - not to please brats.
And you AC (#38619508) [slashdot.org] are mistaken - there's difference between "initial (formal. finished) release" (floppy disk release with 4 times the number of packages Red Hat had at the time), and "founded" - it was available since it's inception, 16 August 1993 (I first installed it Xmas 94,
Slackware was the only other workable distro around that time).
Re:Just install the big grand-daddy of them all (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linux vendor? (Score:4, Informative)
Why would the bog standard boring ass hardware that Dell uses, the same Realtek and Intel and ATI and Nvidia chips that are in more than 85% of the computers on the planet still break, even though these are well known hardware? Its simple because the rampant itch scratching of the devs from Torvalds on down simply are worried about scratching their own little itches instead of worrying about the big picture and what their changes do to the ecosystem. Go to ANY forum after a release and see how many "Update foo broke my drivers!" posts you'll find.
If you mean "Torvalds on down" as the people working on the kernel, you're barking up the wrong tree. It is very rare that any serious regression slips by on that level. Most of the problems Ubuntu have had are because of the poorly tested software stack they put on top, like for example PulseAudio or NetworkManager, that broken Bluetooth stack and so on. Of course it makes little difference to the end user, but there's nothing the kernel can do if it never actually sends the audio to the hardware or goes in an infinite loop, UI settings are ignored or set wrong or it's a user space driver that is borked. In fact, the problem is that they don't have a Torvalds who give them the hairdryer treatment when they generate crap and break things that used to be working, because they don't report to him at all. I do agree that the integration tests are lacking, there's not nearly enough testing all the way from UI to hardware doing what it should. But the lowest part of that stack that Linus manages is the one that gives the least grounds for concern.