Mandriva SA Cedes Control To Mandriva Community 88
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.'"
And THERE'S The Value of FOSS (Score:5, 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!!!)
Mandriva Directory Server (Score:5, 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.
Re:Mandrake, Mandriva, Mageia (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not just hand over what remains of the distro to Mageia? Not like there's a shortage of redundant distros. Although one thing I wish - that Mandriva/Mageia switch their package manager from rpm to apt.
What, and be even less distinguishable from all the "redundant distros", most of which are Debian based?
With Mandrake drawing its last breaths, and uncertainty on whether Attachmate is going to do more with SuSE than keeping it on life support while milking the last drops, there aren't many independent distros left (ones that don't depend on an upstream distro), and that is sad.
Fedora[*], Slackware, Debian, Arch, Gentoo - that's about it?
Most of the rest seem to be dependent distros or narrow niche products.
[*]: I'd say Red Hat, but these days Red Hat is mostly based off Fedora, not the other way around. Patches often flow in the opposite direction, though; support contracts tend to cut down on the WONTFIX or ignoring.
Re:Mandrake, Mandriva, Mageia (Score:4, Interesting)
Please update your list - slackware is dead. No new release in more than a year, the "updated package browser" that was supposed to take a couple of weeks has also been missing in action for more than a year, the server has had many outages (it's currently responds to pings, but no page loads), and the few mirrors don't have much in the way of security and other updates (2 - 3 dozen packages in the last year, depending on the mirror).