“I have finally upgraded from Mandrake 8.0 to 8.2, and I am pleased to say that once it is installed, Mandrake 8.2 can be the base of a home or office desktop that is so fast, flexible, and easy to use that people ought to be lining up to buy it. And, strangely, Mandrake is giving it away instead of selling it.” Read the rest of the editorial at NewsForge.
Mandrake 8.2 – Great Software Distributed Poorly
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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This isn’t the first time Mandrake has had a release available for download before it’s available for purchase. In my book, a smart move would be to make it available for purchase for A MONTH before it’s downloadable. If you’re serious about upgrading, there’s a good chance over the course of a month you might eventually fork over 29.95 or whatever the price is for some CDs – and then maybe these companies might have some serious profit.
I’m a fan of Mandrake’s distro, but I have not been impressed by the stability of 8.2 release. I had 8.1 on a test box, and wiped it out completely to install 8.2. 8.2 hangs unexpectedly sometimes when logging out or rebooting. Things seemed much more stable under 8.1, since I never had such troubles. I am curious what causes the issues. For instance, when logging out, you would expect to return to the login screen. Sometimes, my screen just goes black and that’s the end of it. I then have to reset the box. I am using KDE 2.2.2, just like I was in 8.1 (after update). Perhaps XFree 4.2 doesn’t like my Matrox G100 video as much as well as 4.1 did. I’m sure there is some explanation for it, but as you might guess by my use of Mandrake, my Linux knowledge is on the light side.
Any Nonmouse
“In my book, a smart move would be to make it available for purchase for A MONTH before it’s downloadable.”
Wouldn’t this be illegal and violate the terms of the GPL? And even if it wouldn’t be, what’s to stop someone from buying it and than sticking it up on a public FTP server for others to download?
If I’m correct, and I might not be, the GPL only provides that you make the source “available.” That means you could even CHARGE for it, as long as it’s publibally available. See thekompany.com for more on that.
And who cares if it’s available for download elsewhere? The point is just to jumpstart purchases instead of downloads.
As long as they include the source or make it available, the GPL will not be violated. Posting the source for everyone ahead of time is no big deal since most users are more comfortable with the precompiled binaries.
As for your second question, it’s probably a matter of economics and time/convenience trade-offs. If someone puts the software on a public FTP server, the server will presumably get slashdotted, making downloading a pain in the arse. This is assuming you even know about the server.
If Mandrakesoft can offer a CD at a reasonable price then it would probably be a ton more convenient to buy the disc than hunt down crowded, public ftp servers and deal with the long d/l times.
Of course, the best way to get people to buy the discs is to include cool little incentives, like Mandrake/Tux case badges, mousepads, etc.
“In my book, a smart move would be to make it available for purchase for A MONTH before it’s downloadable.”
Wouldn’t this be illegal and violate the terms of the GPL? And even if it wouldn’t be, what’s to stop someone from buying it and than sticking it up on a public FTP server for others to download?
It would be a great move. It’s, of course, not illegal: they provide the source code on the CD’s in the box that they are selling you.
Nothing would be stopping someone from buying it and putting it up on an ftp site — but I want the freshly pressed CD’s/manual/box delivered to my door. This stuff takes too long for dialup users to get over the net.
If the day comes that we all have wicked-fast internet connections at home and can get the CD’s from the aformentioned ftp site in a matter of minutes… not sure how that’ll affect the current business model here.
JohnG, HTML is not supported. Please read the fine print underneath the posting form on how to use bold and italics from now on. HTTP URLs will auto-parse into HTML, no need to use any kind of tags, just leave a space between the first and last character of the URL (or just write a plain url in its own line).
what’s to stop someone from buying it and than sticking it up on a public FTP server for others to download?
Since MandrakeSoft develope some parts of the package themselves (All the Drake progs) surely they could, if they wanted, legally prevent people from doing this. These programs only sit on top of / alongside the GPL software, so do not have to be GPL themselves. (I do not know what they’re actual licsense is.)
In my book, a smart move would be to make it available for purchase for A MONTH before it’s downloadable.
That’s one way to make your distribution less popular, since there are many linux distributions out of there.
I think they’re business plan is a little similar to Microsoft’s back in the DOS/Win3 days; get the developing product out to as many people as possible. Plus they get bugs back quicker – how pissed would paying customers get at serious bugs.
Once Mandrake has a substantial, loyal following and is a polished, robust distribution (there’s still a lot of work to be done) then they’ll start raking in the money instead of distributing it free. The best way to make a product popular is to give it away first. Any marketing expert will tell you that. I think they’re wise to keep it available for now.
As with Be Inc.’s and IBM’s OS/2’s fate the trouble here may be cold hard cash. In a world where change is evey 4 months the costs of just keeping up are more than most companies can take. I don’t mean to suggest that Mandrake is anything less than solvent (legal disclaimer). What I mean is that it may be how they want to spend money. Could it be that they wish to provide services like Red Hats operation? Seems the cost of a real operating system that competes with windows is still $100 and up.
Wouldn’t this be illegal and violate the terms of the GPL? And even if it wouldn’t be, what’s to stop someone from buying it and than sticking it up on a public FTP server for others to download?There’s many ways this could work,
1) Mandrake don’t offer for download an GPL ISO, but ship their boxed distro. Mandrake only have to offer source to people who have bought their distro. Mandrake offer the GPL download in one months time. One of the distro buyers could redistribute during this time, but as Mandrake’s scheme is just about delay it might give them enough time.
2) Mandrake don’t offer a download ISO. They ship source and binaries as per usual. Although most software contained within is GPL the CD arrangement is their intellectual property, along with the apps they wrote – and they licence this under a proprietary period for the one month when they GPL it.
However, I’ve had a lot of trouble buying current versions of Mandrake and Redhat. This type of scheme wouldn’t encourage me to buy a boxed copy. I am a Mandrake club member.
(Eugenia, any chance of a [blockquote]?)
>(Eugenia, any chance of a [blockquote]?)
No, because if a blockquote is forgotten to be closed, in some browsers it messes up the tables. I recommend you use it the way I used it above. With a > and [ I ] italics. Sorry, but we have to ensure some security, as we had repeated instances this week from people abusing their freedom on this forum.
I think if mandrake does that, the same people will be fuming over it, saying it is gpl it should be available…
But in a way they could do it, SUSE does it, the iso is not available for download, though the contents of what would be on the cd is, in package form.
May be the French would take some tips from the Germans on that front.
Whatever it may be, I like the mandrake distro. Hopefully they will come up with a better business model to achieve financial stability. And yeah they should not be asking for charity.
Ithink it is still the case: If you need a specific distribution for your tasks Linux isn’t the appropriate OS for you. My experience tells me that there are still to many things to know to get a distro running like billOS.
The second thing is SuSE offers a CD only evaluation version. That isn’t helpful for people that really want to install the system. The experience of administering a system with changing files etc. is completely different from running a CD only system. I installed linux on a HD and my impressionwas I’mnot ready to use Linux in a productive environment because my knowledge isn’t thatgood
You never experience this from a SuSE CD!
Your comment says it all for yourself. No offence meant.
I did NOT look backward. It is like cars, if there are to many repairs (PATCHES) and stops (REBOOTS) than it is time to take an other car.
Although the old car had its charmes.
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Does mandrake work with 2 K6-2? I once read something about some gcc-optimizations that excluded this processor, but perhaps this not true anymore?