Another round of changes at Mandriva [LWN.net]

Back in July, 1998, LWN received a message from Gaël Duval announcing the first Linux-Mandrake release. This new distribution was a reworked version of the Red Hat 5.1 GPL release with KDE 1.0 (then not well supported by Red Hat) integrated. It was intended to be an easy to use, desktop-oriented distribution. Linux-Mandrake was also a classic case of an itch being scratched: Gaël put together the distribution he wished he had, released it onto the net, and immediately departed on vacation. The response he found on his return was rather beyond his expectations.

Shortly thereafter, MandrakeSoft was founded in an attempt to build a business around Linux-Mandrake. The story since then has been a series of ups and downs. The Linux bubble hit MandrakeSoft harder than many other companies; when the bottom fell out, MandrakeSoft found itself with a heavy load of expenses, an externally-imposed management team which had little interest in community or the Mandrake distribution, and a rapidly shrinking bank account. After going into bankruptcy, dumping the managers, and refocusing on its real customers, MandrakeSoft actually managed to turn a small profit. Last year, MandrakeSoft acquired Conectiva and renamed itself Mandriva.

On March 7, the company released its first quarter results, which clearly show that Mandriva is not, yet, out of the woods. These results are, as described by the report, "disappointing." Mandriva is no longer making a profit; instead, the company shows a €590,000 loss. Revenue is nearly flat from one year ago, despite the acquisition of Conectiva in the mean time.

So why is Mandriva hurting again? The report gives a number of reasons, including "slower than expected" revenue from OEM contracts, fewer retail sales, money spent on execution of large enterprise accounts, and higher marketing costs. The drop in retail sales is blamed on the spread of broadband Internet connections, which may be partially true. But the availability of other desktop-friendly, free distributions has also grown, and some of those alternatives are quite good. If Mandriva wants to continue to sell individual boxes with Linux disks, it needs to offer something which is clearly better. Mandriva's recent releases have not been that much better.

Mandriva is responding to these results in a number of ways. Cost cutting will be a necessary part of that response. From the report, it seems that Mandriva is engaging in some belated reduction of redundancies caused by the Conectiva acquisition. Unfortunately, it seems that engineering is one place where the company feels over-staffed at the moment, so a number of developers have been let go. So Mandriva's participation in community development, already much reduced from its early years, will shrink again.

The company has also laid off Gaël Duval, the person who got the whole thing started. Jacques Le Marois, another founder of MandrakeSoft, is also on the way out. This company, it seems, is now completely disconnected from its origins.

The report notes that "enterprise services" saw a big increase over the quarter, to the point that they account for 42% of total sales. So "enterprise" appears to be the company's direction for the future. To that end, Mandriva has been working on an administrative tool called "Pulse" which, it is said, will be released in the near future. There is a new distribution for individuals in the works; it will be called "Mandriva One." But this distribution almost looks like an afterthought.

The enterprise market may be where the money is, but there is some competition there too. As Mandriva aims for the corporate clients, it will be running up against Red Hat and Novell, and, to an extent, against the corporate services offered by companies like IBM, HP, and others. Mandriva looks like a bit of an underdog in that crowd. Underdogs can be successful, but their life is not always easy. In response to pressures from this market, Mandriva seems likely to move further away from its community roots. It is telling, in that regard, that Mandriva's reports no longer mention the Mandriva Club, which was once an important part of the company's business. Mandriva moved away from its community roots once before, and things did not go particularly well. One can only hope that the prospects are better this time around.

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Another round of changes at Mandriva

Posted Mar 16, 2006 9:43 UTC (Thu) by lamikr (subscriber, #2289) [Link]

I have also used Mandriva starting from the Mandrake 8. I have it in my desktop, laptop, usb hardrive etc. and has mostly been very happy.

I have met couple of time a some people who have asked me to consider to swithc from Mandriva to another "more free-er" distro but I have not understand why should I do that. It's true that some of the softwares like "modem drivers" or Mandrivas version of open office 2.0 are only available from their site if you pay 60 euro subscription.

But if you will not want to pay, you can always compile those "modem drivers" your self or download "Open Office 2.0" rpms from the oo site for Mandriva.

The amount of software that comes for example with the Mandriva 2006 free dvd is amazing, and the easy of update or install them is amazing. (I have tried to test also other distros but I have used for the Mandrivas way and therefore it has felt most easiest to use for me) In addition there are plf sites from where you can easily download the win32 codecs, etc. that are sometimes needed for watching news and avi clips from the newspages.

Sometimes like yesterday, I jumped with one computer from 2006 version to cooker just to see all of the latest stuff, and upgrade went very well.

The only thing where I would like to see Mandriva playing more active role is the sending their fixes back to upstream. Others distros should do also the same instead of trying to beat each others as there is much more to gain by attracting windows users (95 % of all) to switch to Linux instead of figting with each others how to share the current 5 %...

Another round of changes at Mandriva

Posted Mar 16, 2006 16:28 UTC (Thu) by ranger (guest, #6415) [Link]

OpenOffice.org 2.0 is available in Mandriva 2006.0 contrib:

mandriva/official/2006.0/i586/media/contrib/openoffice.org-go-ooo-2.0-0.m129.3mdk.i586.rpm

on any mirror, although the Club does have some more recent packages (2.0.1 or 2.0.2).

Another round of changes at Mandriva

Posted Mar 16, 2006 18:27 UTC (Thu) by ehovland (subscriber, #2284) [Link]

I have been a long time user of mandrake and mandriva. In fact I am typing this comment in on a mandriva 2006.0 workstation. Most of the time I have found mandrake/mandriva to be a wonderful experience. Some innovations like urpmi were ahead of their time and showed mandrake was paying attention to the user and other distros (debian's apt-get being prior art to urpmi).

I found the club experience to be great and enjoyed the perks that went along with the club.

Having said that, since about 2003 mandrake/mandriva has slowly become a headache for my administrators. The automated install has gotten harder, the kernel QA has gotten worse and the customer support has slowly moved back to Europe which has had a chilling effect on communication. I apologize for myself and other Americans for only knowing one language - but we do and when we spend thousands of dollars on support for a product we expect to be understood and taken seriously. That has gotten hard in recent years.

As I write this my administrators are well along in providing an RHEL solution for our workstations just because they have had an easier time of it and customer service interaction. And the next OS on this workstation will probably not be mandriva.

I can see why they are having financial troubles, they are probably loosing their lucrative market in US based enterprise customers.

BTW, my administrators are the ones mentioned in this article:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/11/1636259

This article was basically the last nail in the coffin for them. That article went so poorly for them (misquotes, release w/o notification, embarrassment from comments on /.) that they still wince when it is mentioned.

Another round of changes at Mandriva

Posted Mar 17, 2006 2:38 UTC (Fri) by denials (subscriber, #3413) [Link]

I was a Mandrake user for 5.3 (Festen) until somewhere around 2003... I
joined the club, got my official DVDs, and spent a whole lot of time
trying to contribute to Cooker. Unfortunately the story seemed the same
for a lot of us; there was an outdated Mandrake Cooker HOWTO with an email
address pointing to a person who was too busy to add our GPG keys to the
keyring, offers to update the HOWTO fell on deaf ears, and eventually I
suspect most of us gave up trying to participate in the community and
moved on to other things.

Gentoo replaced Mandrake on my home server, and is still there -- mostly
because I never have to go through the pain of reinstalls, rather than
upgrades, but also because Gentoo put a lot of effort into making it
painless to become a part of their community.

I wish Mandriva the best of luck in their new direction, and hope that
Gael and Jacques find fulfillment where ever they end up.

Another round of changes at Mandriva

Posted Mar 17, 2006 20:40 UTC (Fri) by stock (subscriber, #5849) [Link]

One really wonders if the merger with Conectiva wasn't the real nail into the Mandrake coffin. The Mandrake 9.x. and 10.x versions were very good IMHO. Mandriva 2006.0 IMHO is not to bad either, certainly when compared to SuSE, where one first needs to gain huge amounts of patience to allow YaST do _ALL_ things for you.

Centos, RedHat and Fedora's yum cannot stand in the shadow of Mandrake/Mandriva's urpmi. Their documentation and implementation of RPM was the first decent one. Anyone doing the Cooker thing knows that. Checking these online manuals right now and i already see the erosion of good documentation taking place as we speak!

So this is a very sad day actually. Watching back to the Conectiva merger, i can only conclude that it basicly was a large failure, which one, normally, only sees coming from covert agenda ridden CEO's of Death. For instance, overnight _ALL_ the webserver names were changed from www.mandrake[something].com to www.mandriva[something-else].com . Normally not a drastic change, but just realize here that all URL's inside the search engines like google.com became useless overnight. Not a single effort was made to proxy requests to old URL's containing the mandrake word to the correct new URL containing the mandriva word.

The list goes on and on. Did someone actually check if that so-called Conectiva distro did contain any skeletons inside its closets? Did anyone ever check that Connectiva actually was a back burner waste "product" from the total failure called "United Linux" ???

To the founders of Mandrake : Never give up, and never give in! Just fork() your last good distro release and come back online!

Best regards,

Robert M. Stockmann

Another round of changes at Mandriva

Posted Mar 23, 2006 10:00 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

I believe the Connectiva merger and "overnight" switch to Mandriva was in
part legal driven -- there had been an ongoing case against Mandrake (the
Linux distribution) from Mandrake the Magician for some time, and IIRC,
shortly before the merger was announced, there was some legal event
somewhat unfavorable to Mandrake (the one we know). Now, I don't believe
it ever went as far as it ultimately could have and IIRC the legal event
had more the flavor of a settlement than something imposed by a court, so
it's quite likely that Mandrakesoft decided to go cut their losses and go
with Connectiva rather than continue to fight, since it offered them a
face saving way out to do so, but one does need to keep this in mind when
thinking about the "fast" switch.

(This all said as a USian that doesn't claim to fully understand the
French legal system, or even his own USian one, so I don't grok the legal
details nor claim too. Additionally, while I started with Mandrake 4 or 5
and switched to Mandrake 8.1 from MSWormOS 98 rather than upgrading to
eXPrivacy, and it shall retain a special place in my heart for that, I
left it behind for Gentoo ~amd64 soon after I upgraded to AMD64 and it
became clear that Mandrake was only interested in corporate support of
AMD64 -- support that therefore seriously lagged x86, even --
especially -- in cooker, in ordered to maintain corporate stability
levels. Gentoo was and remains a far better fit for my use, with
~/testing far more up-to-date and even not-yet-keyworded stuff like
gcc-4.1.0 available if one desires as I do, and with my Mandrake use being
history, I've not followed the Mandriva thing as closely as I would have
otherwise.)

Duncan

Another round of changes at Mandriva

Posted Mar 24, 2006 6:38 UTC (Fri) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link]

> Did someone actually check if that so-called Conectiva distro did contain any skeletons inside its closets? Did anyone ever check that Connectiva actually was a back burner waste "product" from the total failure called "United Linux" ???

No, only the "Enterprise Edition" from 2002 had any relation to United Linux (which was based on SuSE). The main Conectiva distribution began in 1997 as a fork of Red Hat.

I used to run version 10, the last version before the acquisition. It had a version of apt that was modified to support RPM, which I liked more than yum but less than dpkg-based apt. It also seemed to have more bugs than Debian and Ubuntu.

Another round of changes at Mandriva

Posted Mar 18, 2006 0:27 UTC (Sat) by dbreakey (guest, #1381) [Link]

After starting out with Red Hat, many, many years ago, I switched over to Mandrake Linux and never looked back.

Before the switchover, I tried out several other distributions, including SuSE, Debian and a host of others, and just found Mandrake to be the one that offered the best balance of ease-of-use with power; just because I can take it apart and rebuild it, doesn't mean I want to. Most other distributions were either too simplistic or too power-oriented (Debian being the key example there).

In recent years, though, I've been having more and more problems with Mandriva; nothing concrete, but the whole thing just seemed to become less and less 'friendly' somehow. As a result, I just recently switched over to Debian—which has proven to be a lot more user-friendly than I remember older releases to be—and see no reason whatsoever to switch back.

I'm really sorry to see these things happen; I really liked it, but the way things seem to be going, it looks like I walked away from it just in time.