MandrakeSoft CEO Bancilhon is trying to line up venture capital. “We have enough cash to go to the end of the month, but we’re struggling,” he says.
MandrakeSoft: Buy – or We Die!
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I guess quoting from “Blazing Saddles” wouldn’t be appreciated here, for several reasons.
street peddler ???
make a living out of a mess is not easy.
M$ used DOS to feed the initial windows mess
Couldn’t some of these distros vendors works together instead of working competitive? Lindows.com, Lycoris, Mandrake, Xandros, etc. are all targeting for exactly the same users.
United Linux seems like a pretty good idea when I see this.
I am so tired of listening to mandrake whine for money.. every time i go to their website, it’s “please.. send us money or we will go out of business”.. it’s getting old and very irritating. don’t get me wrong, it’s not that i don’t like Mandrake.. but come on.. if you can’t manage a company well enough to get proper funding then the company will fail.
<this is an opinion, don’t waste time flaming.. constructive comments are welcome>
Start a business. Enjoy some success.
Then over extend yourself, get fancy, hire extra staff,
fancy offices,
The same old sad story.
None the less , I feel Mandrake will survive in some form.
They pioneered Linux on the Desktop.
I hope they are able to continue to do so.
Adapt or die.
If Mandrake can’t stop their collapse on their own by adapting to the market, then so be it. There are 400 more distros left to fill in their shoes.
A little consolidation may not be such a bad idea. As much as the linux community is about sharing there is still a lot of ethnocentrism out there, enough to cripple linux’s chance of success.
Mandrake the distribution has been around for longer than MandrakeSoft, and Mandrake Linux will continue on after MandrakeSoft goes under. There’s just such a large user base, that even if the company goes under tomorrow, we’ll still see 9.1 and maybe even 9.2 get released by someone.
I am sure before Linux came along, all the folks at SCO & other Unix shops had pretty good incomes. The exact same job at MDK or any other free distro can’t be so much fun. It help alot when you can rape customers when you need to.
[It help alot when you can rape customers when you need to.]
hehe, it is so true – now MDK is r**ed out of energy
I remember there was a poll on the web asking which distro we believed would soon fail, I was amazed at how many people put other distro’s before Mandrake.
I voted that Mandrake would fail, and although it is not final yet, Mandrake the company will be gone (unless someone actually gives them money), but at least the distro will continue.
I just wish that going from 8.x to 9.0 would have been a real upgrade.
So far with my distro experimenting, I have only been happy with Slack 8.1 and RH8.
???????
Mandrake needs to die. Not that I want to see failures in the Linux realms but this just isn’t a good product and it has been hurting Linux all this time. Mandrake has little or no customer service and little to offer that the other distros don’t already do better. Suse and Red Hat install just as easy and are easier to use (no, I’m not kidding.) Mandrake’s resources (money and talent) can be split up and used more effectively without Mandrake being in the picture.
I used the software for a year, figured I would help a little.
I would join Mandrake club a long time ago, if I did not have to commit for a year.
Besides throwing in a new kde, other packages, this distro didn’t look so great or do much of anything better since 8.0. That’s compared to what other distros have done.
Oh well, linux will still take several years (4-5 min.) for it to compete with Windows… if ever.
Their Customer Service is anything but. I wouldn’t give them another dime if it would save my life.
Windows will always rulez because LinSuck could not find it’s way out of a paper bag if it’s life depended on it. Microsoft has 100,000,000,000,000% better UI, Fonts, Customer Support, and not to mention great features and apps that only run on a Windows platform. Not to mention the fact that Microsoft is the only company that knows how to make money on it’s OS. You don’t see MS begging it’s customers for help like LinSuck companies.
Mandrake was the greatest distro around at one stage, but to be honest, everyone else seems to have caught up to and then surpassed them. Lindows, Lycoris & hell, even Redhat have them beat in terms of an easy-to-use distro. Their last few releases have been dissapointing in my opinion, with 7.2 being the last great one and their approach of throwing everything they can fit into three discs makes them come across as rather unfocused. Their constant pleas for funding are just embarassing and very unprofessional. It was good while it lasted, but I won’t miss Mandrake in 2003.
<<Their Customer Service is anything but. I wouldn’t give them another dime if it would save my life.
I quite agree. However, I (once again!) felt that Mandrake should live on
.
If the company goes under, I certainly will miss the emails from their Customer Service (if I am lucky enough to receive one): the ones which had more English words spelt the French way than I have seen anywhere else.
Of course, the last email I ever recd from them was over an year ago….
Seriously how can you use a unprofessional OS put together by a bunch of pimple faced hacker geeks. You want quality well you are going to have to pay for it.
as a fan of mdk the product, i’m really looking forward to them dying. why? because the people won’t die with mandrake and they’;ll be back. having learnt some lessons. like not having an arrogant customer service. like not being nasty to those who you want to give you a dime or two. like finally throwing away all those horribel horrible unprofessional mandrake graphics and restarting afresh with some decent ones.
mandrake will be reborn – there’s no doubt about that – there will always be a need for a mandrake-style distro … but hopefully its’ll be back having lost the crud
pu
Everyone knows that Mandrake should die and stay dead. One less LinSuck company in the world selling a bloated, secuirty mess called Linux is a godsend. Do yourself a favor and join the winning team at http://www.microsoft.com
GNU/Linux > *
Mandrake was just a player in a competition that got a bit too rough. I’ll be sad to see them go because I “cut my teeth” with Mandrake. But like many others, I used Mandrake to learn the basics and then *BOUGHT* the distro I planned to use, in this case, Red Hat 8.0. BLAH! Maybe I’ll buy a few copies for friends/relatives/hobos.
to the Microsofties: keep on using your “Windows(TM) Appliance”, I’m very happy with the power a GNU/Linux system gives me over Windows XP and wouldn’t switch back if you paid me. 🙂
Mandrake is by most polls the most popular desktop Linux OS. It’s fall shows the stupidity of Linux. REDHAT,SUSE,LYCORIS,MANDRAKE,XANDROS,LINDOWS,PEANUT,ICEPACK,YOPER,and ELX need to join,mate,bond,intertwine,merge,share, or otherwise stop competing with each other and start competing with the big dog MMMSSS. It’s incredible that most Linux users (WHATEVER DISTRO) can see this but the distro’s themselves can’t. It seems that most distro’s would rather be third-rate software, than join together to create an OS capable of competing with windows. Linux has it. But nobody wants to unite it and rule!!!!
There is only three big linux distro: RedHat (and clones),SuSE (=unitedlinux), Debian (and clones).
Mandrake 7.x and 8.x was a nice RedHat clone with better desktop features. But the 9.x lose it’s RedHat compatibility: you cannot run RH 8.0 binary on MDK 9.0 because the glibc version of MDK older then RH8. And the Mandrake 8.0 and later versions are not too lucky: serious automount bugs, missing packages, etc.
“Windows will always rulez because LinSuck could not find it’s way out of a paper bag if it’s life depended on it. Microsoft has 100,000,000,000,000% better UI, Fonts, Customer Support, and not to mention great features and apps that only run on a Windows platform. Not to mention the fact that Microsoft is the only company that knows how to make money on it’s OS. ”
… and this is a good thing for the end user ? For the IT evolution? For the global economy ?
I ordered Mandrake9 from the MandrakeStore. About 2 weeks later they sent an email saying they were unable to ship it. They are begging for cash but have nothing to sell …