If there’s one Linux company that has seen lots of ups and downs it’s the Paris-based Mandriva S.A. They have a great distribution, but as a company, they’ve always been on shaky grounds. First a rumour, now confirmed: the company has put itself up for sale – which, as the community points out, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
DistroWatch highlighted the news, but tuxmachines.org already covered it the day before. The gist of the story, originating from the French Mandriva forums, is that the financial situation has deteriorated rapidly this year, and selling the company is the only remaining option. Two candidates are mentioned: the London-based lightapp Ltd, and Linagora from France.
The news is confirmed by Linagora itself, who posted a statement on their website, in French. My French is good enough to understand what the statement says; Linagora is looking to strenghten its position in France and the rest of the world, and is in negotiations with Mandriva regarding an acquisition. Heck, even if you’ve never studied French, you should get the gist here.
“LINAGORA est un acteur majeur de l’innovation et de l’édition Open Source et, est ainsi à la recherche de toutes les opportunités pour développer et renforcer sa position de leadership en France et dans le monde,” the statement reads, “A ce titre, des discussions sont en cours avec Mandriva pour étudier le rachat d’une partie des actifs de la société.”
This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, the Mandriva community points out. “Folks, just because they’re looking to sell doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad,” writes ruel24, “Honestly, Mandriva has never had a business sense about them. They make a great distro, and always have. What they lack is capital and direction, and hopefully someone will provide both.”
Time will tell. Luckily, this is an open source company, so the Mandriva distribution will still be developed by the community no matter what the corporate future brings.
Statement is a bunch of legal talk, then saying ad stuff about Linagora trying to strengthen its position in the OSS world.
They then say that they’re negotiating to buy a part of Mandriva (“actifs” in french could mean people/structures/hardware/software/IP… basically anything mandriva “owns” or manage). They also say they will not comment further before the end of the negotiations.
If another frenchie roams around here and could clarify what “une partie des actifs” means legally (better than I do, I’m a CS/math major ^_^).
I’m no frenchie, but spanish isn’t all that different from french. At least in spanish, a company assets can be divided in two classes called “active” and “passive”. Active is everything your company “owns” (from chairs and computers to any kind IP they might have), including money other people/companies owe you. Passive is everything you company owes.
So, “A ce titre, des discussions sont en cours avec Mandriva pour étudier le rachat d’une partie des actifs de la société.” means something like:
“At this point, discussions are in course with Mandriva to study the acquisition of part of the company assets.”
Edit: Clarifications.
Edited 2010-05-11 14:09 UTC
In french “une partie des actifs” just means “some part of assets”.
PS: I’m french
Looking at the Wikipedia entry it seems Mandriva have made quite a few acquisitions since their last bout of financial trouble (2003-2004), yet we seem to be back at square one.
Is Ubuntu killing Mandriva?
Mandriva S.A. can’t afford all the ship-it and advertising programs Mark can pay for.
It’s a shame because Mandriva is more advanced than Ubuntu and contributes a lot to the kernel and KDE.
Ubuntu is more popular than Mandriva and can partner with hardware vendors more easily.
Money breeds money and kills products. It’s sad.
Edited 2010-05-11 14:36 UTC
It’s a shame because Mandriva is more advanced than Ubuntu and contributes a lot to the kernel and KDE.
I kind of agree. Mandriva devs keep constantly pushing patches upstream, ranging from bug fixes to security and even new features. I don’t know about Ubuntu devs, nor can I objectively say anything about it being more advanced as I am a Mandriva user myself.
But! Every time I’ve tried Ubuntu I’ve always went back to Mandriva pretty fast. Mandriva just happens to really be rock-solid from almost every point of view, it is both easy to jump on for a newbie but also offers power-users everything they could ask for. And that Mandriva control center — while slightly ugly — has to be among the best all-around configuration tools in use.
Again though, I am biased, I really like Mandriva as a distro
Possibly, but I doubt it. Mandriva just haven’t expanded into the areas that they should have done when they emerged from bankruptcy the last time. How well you’re doing on DistroWatch doesn’t matter, and we’ve seen many distributions at the top of DistroWatch that have fallen by the wayside.
Ubuntu and Canonical are in the same boat. Behind Red Hat all of these Linux distributions are having to find a revenue stream for themselves. Mark Shuttleworth’s money tap will have been running out for some time and even for them there has been a noticeable change in language in recent months towards creating sustainable revenue.
Mandriva S.A. is one of the most incompetent companies I have ever had the misfortune to deal with. Quite frankly doesn’t deserve to survive.
It was emblematic of the deep problems that this company had that when Mandrakelinux became a commercial entity, nobody bothered to check whether they had licensed the “Mandrake the Magician” name and logo from the Hearst Corporation. Even before Ubuntu was invented Mandriva was one of the dumbest operators around. Despite constant recapitalisations they have continued to lose money hand over foot for almost a decade. That they have survived this long is a testament to how good their core products are; investors obviously see a roadmap to profitability but management just as obviously can’t even find the car keys.
The institutionalised stupidity that is/was Mandriva was visible everywhere. I can’t comment about the last few years, but up until at least 2007, the company’s customer service was SO bad that half the time I wanted to shoot myself. Even simple tasks (e.g. purchasing a downloadable product) became odysseys. Further, the company often made disastrous decisions regarding its community product that alienated users and reduced its bottom line (often when the intent was to better it). Mandriva never understood the need to put customers first, and never understood the need to be seen as a good community citizen (despite employing a large number of developers who contributed to key open source projects). This was something that extended beyond bad management and always suggested a very poor corporate culture.
The company’s culture cannot have been helped by management’s abysmal record regarding staffing decisions. Adam Williamson, who literally held together the consumer division with duct tape and string at times, was let go (snapped up by Red Hat). Gael Duval was fired outright (founded Ulteo, innovator in cloud technology), and Joseph Cheek disappeared from the company just 8 months after the Lycoris acquisition (moved to TimeSys R&D – great loss for desktop Linux UI development).
The combined loss of these three people alone was probably enough to ensure that Mandriva woukd never become profitable. And the sad thing is that AFAIK they were all let go essentially because the corporate hacks put in by the early investors didn’t understand what they contributed and how critical those contributions were.
I think the only thing which made the company as a whole even remotely viable was the South American business unit, a legacy of the Conectiva acquisition. But I imagine that years of mismanagemnent from Paris has seen even this go down the drain.
Let’s hope someone snaps up the distro and fires all of the non-R&D staff. A clean break is needed IMHO.
I dont think o.
As far as i can say, Red Hat, Novel and Mandriva SA has never looked for ‘World Domination’. They just want to sell more support.
It just hasnt been their target.
The only company who has invested to bring linux to mainstream is Ubuntu. Thats why it succeeded more than others on this.
Wrong. Mandriva was one of the first companies to invest to bring Linux to the mainstream. Difference is that Mandriva can’t even invest 1/10 of the money Mark can invest, simply because Mark is 500 times richer than Mandriva.
To say that Mandriva has never invested to bring Linux to the mainstream is 100% wrong. Mandriva is all about that since day 1.
Edited 2010-05-11 15:08 UTC
Yep. Mandriva (Mandrake) Linux packs were available for sale at big-name retailers years before Ubuntu had it’s first release.
Actually RedHat and Novell are doing the stuff (writing/testing code). Canonical (Ubuntu) is just making marketing. Their contribution to the stuff that matters is almost equals to 0.
0? more like -1. The new unified titlebar thing will make every Linux application inconsistant. Gnome made some effort to be consistent since few release (after being the most inconsistent UI family of all modern OS). Now, back to square one, everybody can do what the hell they think about without restriction of forced HIG. On top of that, KDE will be affected by those exotic gnome apps invading the KDE space, braking KWin and most of the KDE good effort to be consistent since KDE4.0. Many of their “idea” are making things worst. Upstart and not following LSB -at all- is an other one, it is a sysadmin nightmare, they are bringing Linux to the inconsistency of Unix under and on top of the hood.
No, 0. I’d add
+1 for hardware support (especially when it comes to actually testing proprietary graphic drivers, instead of pushing buggy latest releases)
+1 for good repositories (stolen from debian but hey ! Does it really matter ?)
-1 for buggy releases
They contribute to the linux world by making a debian release that’s actually usable by normal computer users without sysadmin help. That has some value.
For those looking for Mandriva alternatives, you might want to have a look at Pardus ( http://www.pardus.org.tr/eng ). It’s still a young project, but they’re going forward at a fast pace and have a solid distro with good attention to details which matter (like first time in a while I see a good and integrated KDE 4 experience, and a lot of control center-like applets put in kde control center).
Edited 2010-05-11 21:58 UTC
I know that. Im not saying who contributes more.
Red Hat contributes a lot. But the company never tries seriousely to get some desktop market share.
well, they stated clearly that they’re not interested in the Desktop because they don’t see any revenue opportunity in that market.
Or, at least, this was their position a few years ago. Apparently they haven’t changed that much.
http://press.redhat.com/2008/04/16/whats-going-on-with-red-hat-desk…
Which pretty much sums up: Linux is for servers, and will never have a strong desktop presence.
I couldn’t agree more.
Linux does have quiet a strong desktop presents. I call an estimated 20 million+ desktop users pretty strong. Linux also commands 35% of the Netbook market.
Linux just needs to break the OEM mould, which Microsoft have with an iron grip. Linux is successful in a lot of markets now and it’s only a matter of time before it starts making in-rows into the desktop OEM market. The Smart phone and Netbook markets are good signs.
Except that in today’s world, it is mostly the marketing that matters. If people are not aware of your product, if you don’t have enough user base, how do you expect progress? More users bring more developers, more mindshare, more business opportunities, and so on. And Ubuntu has contributed hugely in this regard.
That is not to say I would not welcome more code contribution, more love for Kubuntu, etc. But dismissing their role as a catalyst for Linux acceptance is just pure ignorance.
As for the topic: I hope everything goes well and Mandriva (or should I say Mandragora? See, we are almost back at the beginning
) remains what it is now: a nice Linux distro.
i think marketing is a really important part of pushing linux out into the masses. Word of mouth works only so far, the constant marketing is working as more and more people are hearing and trying linux.
Although not contributing as much to the code itself, i think the marketing they do is invaluable to Linux as a whole, in getting linux to be accepted in the mainstream and getting people to talk about linux.
Sorry, but it’s precisely this kind of thing that keeps Linux behind. Marketing doesn’t matter? Really? Are we really still at that level?
If Linux had the same kind of marketing presence in corporations that Microsoft has (including their training programs, vendor agreements, executive giveaways and all-inclusive vacations), Linux would be on every desktop within a decade. Then, those tiny niggling problems that we geeks spill blood for (e.g., the absurd Ubuntu window button debate that had more ideological fire than a gang of jihadis at an American town-hall meeting on health care reform) and that we keep stupidly blaming for preventing the advent of “The Year of the Linux Desktop” would dissipate. There would be a flood of corporate interest in GNOME and KDE, and all those issues would get ironed out.
Remember, Windows had always been crap until fairly recently, and yet their marketing prowess led to a very real dominance among the only thing that ultimately matters in the computer world: hardware vendors. The role of marketing is subtle, and few would claim that people choose Microsoft because of their advertising campaigns or user interface design (Windows 7 being the exception, only because of a grassroots loss of faith after Vista and increased competition from Apple). But people do “choose” Windows when it’s the only realistic option, and it’s the only realistic option only when the people who make your hardware (not to mention your software) have been convinced and cajoled into supporting only Redmond’s OS.
Kernel developers have done an admirable job at writing their own drivers from scratch, but until hardware manufacturers start making quality drivers en masse for Linux, open source will always be playing a defensive game. It would be interesting to see Linus Torvalds walk into AMD’s boardroom and invite them to dinner and drinks to discuss their lousy proprietary drivers, or to see Richard Stallman talk in Mandarin to some Chinese IC factory foreman to convince him that he and his workers will earn more when his employer starts doing contract work for hardware companies that have open source drivers. Same situation applies to software. That’s real marketing, the kind that the big boys engage in, the kind that locks corporations into a single platform and gets stuff done.
Software development is an ecosystem that depends on many critical processes and all of them feed into each other. I might also give Ubuntu a 0, but only because their efforts have not gone far enough. I commend what they have done with the desktop, but that has nothing to do with marketing, of which I see almost nil, save for Red Hat and Novell. Like everyone else, I condemn Ubuntu for not uploading patches upstream, giving back to the broader community, etc., but in the end that may be a comparatively smaller piece of the puzzle than we often claim it is.
Redhat and Novell have don’t intend make money from the Desktop. Redhat has even said it outright.
Ubuntu is the only one which focuses on desktop Linux. Secondly, your comments shouts ignorance. Ubuntu/Canonical *is* contributing.
Launchpad, desktopcouch, Software Center, Indicator Applet etc are contributions, Upstart. If other distros don’t pick it up then it’s not Ubuntu’s fault.
Upstart has been adopted, Software Center and desktopcouch are going to make it’s way into Debian properly. Keep a watch on ubuntu-dev list.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! His comment shouts ignorance? Read yours man! Do you even know there are other distros? Have you ever tried something else? Ubuntu is a Linux distribution among many others. Mandriva is another one and to say that it doesn’t focus on the desktop is just plain ignorant.
Edited 2010-05-12 07:34 UTC
Yes. It does shout ignorance. He said Ubuntu works on marketing. Marketing is one aspect of the whole thing.
Everyone knows there are other distros. Nothing special. Yeah. I have tried all major *desktop* distros. Before I jumped to Ubuntu, there was Fedora and OpenSuse, both backed by big companies and none of them tried to convert people to Linux. All they did was snatching users from one camp to another.
It was only after Ubuntu came into prominence, that many people tasted Linux. Most(90%) of the new converts I have seen are Ubuntu users.
And that is because they don’t know Mandriva, precisely because of Marketing (or lack of). No ship-it program and less marketing power.
You got the point. Marketing is also a important thing. Unless people know what you are making, it’s useless. A strong community is also very important. Not only strong, but also very tolerant community.
Anyway Ubuntu brings many users to Linux, more users, more crashes, more bug reports, more bug fixing. Isn’t it? Well it’s an irony that Launchpad has too many bugs which they need to triag before it becomes unmanageable. Another aspect of that huge unattended bug list is that there are more users than contributors which is sharp contrast to the traditional model of Linux.
Precisely. So what’s the problem? We were discussing whether Ubuntu contributes or just does marketing.
Lesson learnt: Do enough marketing. Shipit is just a part of marketing.
Anyway we moved off-topic. We were discussing why Ubuntu does not contribute rather than who has more money.
Although it got Ubuntu started, the money for ShipIt ended a long time ago as will Mark Shuttleworth’s money for all of that ‘marketing’ fairly soon. Benefactors’ pockets are not limitless.
Then do so.
Ubuntu started shipping free CDs. That is the extent to which their marketing went and that’s what kickstarted their DistroWatch popularity. Nothing more.
You can repeat that as many times as you want but the fact is that Ubuntu is doing absolutely nothing that other distributions aren’t doing either technically or organisationally. If you can point out what those things are then fine, but you won’t be able to because these conversations have been had before. The extent of Ubuntu’s differences is switching the window controls around.
Oh, and that ‘convert people to Linux’ statement is utter undefinable crap.
Maybe Texstar could buy it, then he’d own both PCLinuxOS and Mandrivia
…I’ve never heard of “LINAGORA.”
Just like all the other Linux distro’s. Novell have only just broken even on their Linux business.
Unless such Linux based companies secure long-term revenue, they’re going to have problems. Canonical might as well because their support and music store money isn’t going to do it, since they’re relying on Mark to keep them afloat.
Linux distros companies need to start making proper in-rows in such markets like Redhat have, whether that be server, desktop or enterprise and secure a long-term revenue stream from OEMs.
They’ve done that by redefining certain parts of their business as ‘open source’ or ‘open solutions’, and even then it’s not enough to replace the Netware revenue they’re losing.
Everyone apart from Red Hat has a less than secure looking future.
Now it could be the language barrier but I looked at Mandriva for the company I work at for our servers and they couldn’t touch RedHat. Now Mandriva’s price may be cheaper than RedHat’s top end but I use RH’s web support on most of my systems and that is half the price of either Mandriva or Ubuntu. I don’t need 24/7 phone support on 95%+ of my systems I have 5 boxes that require that support so I still use RH it makes sense the others may be a bit cheaper here but consistency is worth the couple of extra dollars. These other companies need to compete with RH not just also offer support.
You mean we may be out of mandribble?
Makes me sad that Ubuntu is what it is mainly because Mark’s money tap. However, I think we needed someone to do this, for Linux in general.
I just wished other distros wanted the mainstream too. A world where competition would boil down to a general refinement in Linux desktop.
Red Hat invests very heavily on desktop technologies way more than other vendors. However the traditional desktop market for Linux doesn’t seem to be profitable for Red Hat or anyone else for that matter.
Red Hat and Novell are public companies and have to answer shareholder. Investing on a desktop product without a solid fairly short term plan to yield revenue would not fly very well with investors who are funding the company.
Canonical is a startup willing to take that risk in order to compete with established vendors and have that leeway because it is a private business funded by a very rich person. Even for Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth admits desktop is just a gateway to the other business areas he wants to profit from including the proprietary cloud services like UbuntuOne etc.
This doesn’t seem mean one approach is better than others. It is just different ways of operating the commercial business. It is naive to believe that any investment, be it development or marketing is not focussed on the commercial viability of it.
Edited 2010-05-12 01:56 UTC
This can end smoothly or very ugly. It depends on whoever buy Mandriva, to decide what to do with it, and how to approach the markets. For example, a new owner may decide that they prefer Gnome and drop KDE. Get the developers, and drop the whole distribution… who knows.
The sale of Mandriva will not only affect Mandriva, but every spin-off project that relied on it. Textar and other community members that forked from Mandriva will have to either join forces and keep the Mandriva based code, or respin from another distribution like Fedora or OpenSUSE.
Off-topic:
Heck, even if you’ve never studied French, you should get the gist here.
“LINAGORA est un acteur majeur de l’innovation et de l’édition Open Source et, est ainsi à la recherche de toutes les opportunités pour développer et renforcer sa position de leadership en France et dans le monde,” the statement reads, “A ce titre, des discussions sont en cours avec Mandriva pour étudier le rachat d’une partie des actifs de la société.”
I have never studied French and I am originated from Asia. So I only can get some words out of the statement;
innovation, open source, opportunities, developer, position, leadership, France, discussions, Mandriva, party, society(?)
Sorry but with those words only, I really cannot get the gist there. I would not understand unless I read the translation. Please do not assume that others also should because you could. AFAIK, many of the OSNEWS visitors are also from countries where English is just a foreign language (not fluent)
Back to the topic:
I haven’t used Mandriva before and I have only once or twice seen someone installing Mandriva before. But still I wish Mandriva to be sold to the right company at the right cost, and to continue to support people who need of Mandriva’s services.
He summed up what’s said in the article, and the first comments give other translations (in english too!).
Maybe you should read.
If you don’t understand, maybe you should take this opportunity to learn
Anyway, you can always use Google translate.
“Linagora is a major actor of the Open Source market and is thus looking for every opportunity to develop and strengthen its leadership position in France and worldwide”, the statement says,” As such, discussions are underway with Mandriva to study the acquisition of part of the assets of the company.”
Looking at the Linagora website (1998 stylish), I doubt they are able to restart Mandriva and put it on the rails!!!
Never heard of this company too.
Yeah, make your conclutions based on the design of the website. Smart!
If you don’t have anything sensible to say, why not keep your mouth shut?
I worked for Linagora for one year. They are probably the worst company to continue Mandriva work.
They care a lot about making money (which is ok for a company), crushing other companies (a bit less ok) and they do not care at all about contributing to free software.
They have one of the highest turn-over in France due to their great HR capabilities and are almost universally hated by former employees and the whole French IT ecosystem.
In short, they are the nastiest, most vicious sharks navigating the French IT waters.
You mean even worse than Canonical?
Yes, incomparably worse.
Kudos for quoting the french original with a paraphrasing explanation.
Mandrake (it will always be mandrake to me, no matter how many times I am corrected) was the first distro I REALLY tried.
It was a distro aimed at ease of use and the consumer market while redhat was still aimed at business and only business. This showed in how it was in day to day life.
I will be interesting where the new company takes the product. At the end of the day, home users do not contribute the revenue…. To make money (read big money) you have to target business and gov as well.
I wonder, if it ends up with the london firm, if they have an eye on selling it to councils and UK gov institutions. The product itself is known and stable, easy to use and a possible winner under the Tories’* ‘digital manifesto’** where they are proposing;
“We will create a level playing field for open source IT by implementing open standards across government IT systems”
*Tories are the newly elected biggest party in the UK
**http://www.conservatives.com/Policy/Where_we_stand/Technology.aspx
This is a decent topic.
Say.. Shouldn’t you be talking about Apple?