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."
Dilution sucks! (Score:4, Interesting)
An existing investor wants to make sure that his investment isn't marginalized through accepting additional investment at unfavorable terms, in turn reducing their effective ownership over Mandriva.
can you blame them?
Just install the big grand-daddy of them all (Score:3, Interesting)
Since the Ubuntu desktop wreckage of late I've switched to Debian. couldn't be happer. cut out Shuttleworth's meddling and go straight to the source :-)
Re:It's a damn shame (Score:5, Interesting)
Mandrake has a tradition of problems, basically since they were Mandrake. Back then, they used to be the more desktop friendly redhat. Being French, they had good i18n support before redhat did, switched to utf early one, provided international packages, and also multimedia. But at that time their community was registered users only, if you didn't have the current version purchased: no soup for you.
Mandrake was always reluctant to share documentation. As a result, they cut themselves off from the larger community. Good innovations like a metapackager, that got users out of rpm-dependency hell long before redhat moved in that direction, or also mandrakes system of setting security level never made it back to a wider audience.
I worked on the docs until the 8.x releases, IIRC. They wanted everything done in DocBook or your could not participate.
The problems with wider adoption of urpmi, mcc and msec and other Mandriva utilities (including their installer) were that they were written in perl and the RedHat world used python. They would also get great ideas for some things and then never maintain them.
And they had a leader who was more interested in computer aided "learning centers" and squandered a good deal of their cash.
I still use Mandriva (stopped at 2010.2). I don't care for some of the folks at Mageia, so I'll be sad to see Mandriva go if it does (used it since 5.2).
Balance (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem here is that so many distributions are high-quality and free that these days, you need to offer something extra in order to either excite people into using and coding to support your distro and creating hype and popularity or giving them enough in support to encouraged a paid-for environment that works. With Ubuntu, it's been usability...it's such a far-reaching and diverse distro with several major window managers offered that it covers a lot of ground -- and handing out disks for free way back in the day (are they still? -- I'm personally not sure...) certainly helped a lot. My first installation of Ubuntu was from a free disk I got from them. The user base and support system is also MASSIVE. I mean, I've used many, many distros over the years from Fedora to Mint to Ubuntu and many more but usually whenever I'd search for the fix to some problem it would inevitably be posted in some Ubuntu forum or blog. That not only gets the name out there but helps users to easily get accustomed to the different environment if they're switching from another OS.
I never even tried Mandriva. Why? It didn't seem like it had anything special to offer. Now keep in mind that I've tried over 20 or so distros over the years. The fact that wasn't one of them says something. If they want to stick around, they need to take a lead from other Open Source software like Ubuntu, Slackware, or even non-Linux distributions...just desktop software that's become popular like various media players or Firefox itself.
Bottom line? Offer something unique/special/above the competition and you'll succeed...if you're not going to do that...then the question really becomes: why would anyone move to your distro anyway, let alone stick with it?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's a damn shame (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, technically Mandrake/Mandriva was always innovative. I especially liked the installer and the DrakX tools. System-config-whatever doesn't even come close, and it's been 10 years.
Financially they were always in terrible shape. First there was the investment or loan they had from I think an Americain investor. They controlled management, and decided to head into the directionm of education. The management didn't want that, they wanted to stay in de Linux distro business. That caused the loan/investment to terminate, and there had to be paid millions back in a short timeframe.
Later on they had raised money through shares. Still they always needed money from the users, with subscriptions through the Club.
There was always the continuous hiring of people, and then the next reorganisation where people had to be let go. It seemed to happen every year.
And always there was the promise of becoming profitable next year. I even read in it this news.
For me the straw broke when they decided to let all their French developers go, and refocus of Brazilian and Russian developers.
I've used Fedora, but the upgrades every half year were a bit terrible (a whole evening of fiddling). I'm now on Debian. That's one distro that I feel will always be around, and gives lots of freedom.