The french online magazine Clubic has published an interview with MandrakeSoft founder Gaël Duval. Update: English translation here.
Interview with Gaël Duval of MandrakeSoft
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
How about a warning that the interview is in French? 🙂
It is not like you are missing something… The interview is crap ( with several French mistakes ). Just “mandrake is the best”, linux is much better than windows, etc…
Instead of talking about facts, just some marketing stuff. It is boring when it is coming from Microsoft or Sun, it is boring when it is coming from Mandrake, too.
I want to read the marketing. 🙁
Can someone please translate for us stupid americans?
What do you expect the founder of MANDRAKE to say? “Yeah, linux isn’t that good”?
He says (among other things) that he has a secret hope that Mandrake will play an important part in developing the IT industry in France and Europe. but so far their customers are mostly in North America.
MandrakeSoft is making progress in selling desktop software to business.
Mandrake 9.2 will have fewer visible changes than earlier releases, but improved ergonomics and refinement of details.
There are over 16,000 subscribers to MandrakeClub.
Mandrake accounts for 15-25% of distros used worldwide, so if the total number of Linux users is around 18 million, this gives Mandrake about 3.6 million users.
Sales of boxed distros have been falling for 3 years, and not just for Mandrake, which is why they are developing other economic models such as MandrakeClub.
He is not worried by the SCO lawsuits, and considers that the continued survival of Linux is assured.
He is however worried by software patents, which he sees as a way for large companies to crush their smaller competitors.
Mandrake are developing partnerships with large companies like HP, Intel and AMD.
The period of protection against their creditors has just been extended until the start of 2004. “At the same time we have had to undertake a major restructuring of the company to trim our sails while awaiting better days.”
Mandrake are not planning to develop for the PDA market (a specialised market with a vague business model), but their software already supports WiFi and Bluetooth.
He hints that there will be an exciting and novel software development in Mandrake following the release of 9.2.
I hope this helps.
Mike
Thank you babel fish..
http://www.clubic.com/ar/2369-1.html&lp=fr_en“ rel=”nofollow”>http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr?doit=done&urltext=http:…
enjoy
Mmh, looks like pidgin, is it really understandable?
I never said babel fish was perfect
but you can get an understanding of what the interview is about at least 
Eugenia, do you speak French?
>Eugenia, do you speak French?
Not really/much. But I can understand french conversations most of the times. (I did 15 sessions of french last spring, but didn’t studied too hard)
As it stands now, mandrake is going to put ads into 9.2 No matter if its the free online version or the powerpack. All I have to say is bye bye if they do that. Hopefully they will reconsider…or just put it on the free version. I have no problem buying linux for 60 bucks.
Mandrake accounts for 15-25% of distros used worldwide, so if the total number of Linux users is around 18 million, this gives Mandrake about 3.6 million users.
——————–
about 1/5 of the worldwide distro “market”?
that’s pretty darned impressive considering they were just
started 5 years ago.
good job.
I hardly think that a few bookmarks in Mozilla and an advertising screen during the installation procedure make Mandrake “adware”.
alors les 4 autres étaient déjà des versions majeures en 1998. Ceci avec des moyens souvent très inférieurs à ceux de nos concurrents. Pendant ces 5 mêmes années,
Par ailleurs on a vu apparaître des systèmes Linux purement orientés bureautiques, mais malgré tout nous n’avons jamais été tant reconnus pour la facilité d’accès au produit
> In 1998 the other 4 were already established distributions. We made it with very much fewer ressources than our competitors.
Besides, we have seen the appearance of Office desktops oriented Linux systems, but we never got the recognition of the easier access to the system we provided. <
This two points are right. Mandrake is one of the best desktop Linux, if not the best, and it is the easiest in accessing some of the powerfull features of Linux that can make a desktop productive. That they have achieved so far. In my opinion and experience much better than Red Hat 9.
____________________
Duval also says there will be less “visible” changes in 9.2 than in the last two versions, but they are improving ergonomy and other deatils.
(Il y a aura moins de changements “visibles” dans la 9.2 que dans les deux versions précédentes.)
>Eugenia, do you speak French?
Not really/much. But I can understand french conversations most of the times. (I did 15 sessions of french last spring, but didn’t studied too hard)
then maybe its time for u to go back to school and
study a little harder. there could be more and more
french articles about Mandrake in the future and we
would love it if u would translate them for us.
hurry up now
[i]mandrake is going to put ads into 9.2[i]
If you pay for your software (60-70 Euros isn’t that much for a DVD with 1,5 GBytes of Mandrake software) you don’t get that much of ads.
You decide.
As it stands now, mandrake is going to put ads into 9.2 No matter if its the free online version or the powerpack. All I have to say is bye bye if they do that.
…and this is “evil” because?
Whatever you have to endure during install, it’s only a one-time “annoyance.” And you can delete the bookmarks.
Some Linux “community.” A vendor provides a quality, free-as-in-beer distro for years and then you all bitch when they try revenue models to pay the bills while still letting you leech on their product without paying for it.
Or would you have preferred Mandrake went the route that SuSE did from Day 1–no iso’s except for paying customers.
Speaking of interviews, here is a new one with Debian’s Martin ‘Joey’ Schulze:
http://www.fcenter.ru/articles.shtml?interview/7474
and another with Conectiva’s Marcelo Tosatti:
http://idgnow.terra.com.br/idgnow/business/2003/09/0032
The first one is in Russian and the second in Portuguese, but what the heck – let’s put them all into the headlines at OSNews!
But seriously, I agree that there should be a clear warning that the interview is in French (yes “French”, not “french”) – the reason is that many online publications are produced in multiple languages so simply indicating the country of origin is not sufficient.
As it stands now, mandrake is going to put ads into 9.2 No matter if its the free online version or the powerpack. All I have to say is bye bye if they do that. Hopefully they will reconsider…or just put it on the free version. I have no problem buying linux for 60 bucks.
Ads will not appear in the paid versions of their software, also, the paid ads do not in anyway talk, communicate or “spy” on your most “important” work. Yes, that was sarcasm.
Could you pretty please post a translated version in english of this interview? I was always out playing Quake or StarCraft or something else during my French classes in High School… I always hated that language by the way. But I do love German and English!
Aegir of LinuxFrench.net phoned last week Jacques Le Marois, CEO of Mandrakesoft who gave details about the amount of publicity in the free downloadable 9.2 version. There will be one publicity for an antivirus during the installation process and one bookmark added. There will not be a screensaver with publicity in 9.2.
The adds are offered only to Mandrake Partners. A Mandrake Partner is something similar to a Microsoft Partner : a company selling hardware, software or IT services who want to have a logo ‘Mandrake Linux Ready’ and is ready to pay something for it. By having a publicity in the installation process, these partners can advertize their products to the Mandrake userbase.
If it works, Mandrakesoft will certainly try to get more adds in 9.3 but these adds will not be general adds like on a free web site like OSNews but targeted adds for the Mandrake users.
http://www.linuxfrench.net/article.php?id_article=1297
Thanks Charles for putting all the FUD to rest (Hopefully…)
And Marc (IP: —.triad.rr.com)
“… I always hated that language by the way. But I do love German and English!”
Very please to know that you hate French and love German and English.
I d just like to point at that German is not a language as far as my ears can tell.
“I d just like to point at that German is not a language as far as my ears can tell.”
If I were you I woudn’t give a damn ’bout what my ears can tell.
A couple of our French friend on the #MUB have transalated this for everyone. Here you go.
http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php?t=7985
Thank you roland and theYinYeti 😉