Mandriva: We're not dead

OK, I'm only joking. I know Mandriva isn't dead. Russian companies just bought a controlling interest and pumped money into the company. This story claims Mandriva is ramping up in France and Brazil after firing most of their existing development team. The Russian presence is just testing and Q&A. OTOH, the article I quoted yesterday states that to compete to be the Russian national OS that Mandriva will have to shift its development to Russia.

The real question is whether the new Mandriva will retain its community and user base or will they move with the developers to Mageia? Will Mandriva's community release(s) next year be of good quality? Will they be compelling offerings?

Perhaps the more important question is whether or not the new Mandriva management actually has a workable business plan. I don't see one or really much of anything new in this statement. Will their new Russian overlords just keep pumping money in or, at some point, will they replace the French management team with their own?

I feel happy.... I feel happy...

The question that comes to my mind deals with how Mandriva will compete with the upcoming fork. If Mageia offers things that the Mandriva "subscription" distro offered, what incentive do we have to purchase it?

I don't resent paying for good software, what I do resent (and a major reason I quit using Mandriva) is the constant haranguing to "upgrade"

h

Yeh i quit Mandriva a long time ago due to its upgrade strategies and its suspect quality control.

Here is my prediction they will fail and most general Mandriva desktop users will move to Mageia for the simple reason that folks no longer have any trust in Mandriva as a company.

I suspect i wont be eating these words any time soon.

I used mandrake/mandriva back in the day as well(early 2000), but helios, I'm not sure what you mean by "constant haranguing" to upgrade. It's not like you got pop-ups everyday pleading for an upgrade. During its heyday mandriva was one of the best linux distros available and I did contribute when I used their distro as my primary desktop but I always felt it was in the nature of a charitable contribution. The membership gave you few, if any, tangible benefits that were not easily available by adding repos after installing the free version. I later came to the conclusion that there were better beneficiaries of my charitable largesse, eg. the HeliOS Project does some fine work with disadvantaged kids I'm given to understand.

As far as losing the mandriva community to mageia, I agree that will probably occur for the reasons stated by others. Mandriva has demonstrated that it does not appear possible to create a sustainable business based on the linux desktop usage and that it is similarly not possible to leverage dominance on the linux desktop into success in the enterprise, the only place where anyone has made substantial money with linux. Ubuntu appears to be learning the same sad lesson. For this reason, having a large desktop user base is not that great of a business asset as one would, at first glance, assume.

Ubuntu may have a viable desktop business model by competing with iTunes and selling cloud storage and finding other services that desktop users may want to purchase. I could see Ubuntu building on what they have now and becoming profitable. I don't see anything in the statements by Mandriva management that convince me they have even a vague clue how to make money.

Mandriva still has some significant market share in Brazil on the server inherited from Connectiva but they have been frittering that away steadily. They talk about the server and have a product but a big part of a successful server offering like Red Hat's is built on the reputation for support and consultancy services, where Red Hat excels. Mandriva, after firing most of their developers and with no support staff left at all, really has no way to compete in that market. No wonder Red Hat is back up to an 87% share of the server market.

Quoting:I could see Ubuntu building on what they have now and becoming profitable

I think your description of the Ubuntu business strategy is correct as far as it goes, but I disagree with your above conclusion. I don't see any evidence of this approach being successful. I also see plenty of evidence that Ubuntu would love to break into the server/enterprise market but to date, they have gotten nowhere in that market.

Linux desktop distros seem to naturally gravitate toward a community based model - either pure community non-profit based like Debian or hybrid distros with one or a few core developers and widespread community support through voluntary contributions of both money and labor. I believe history has shown that these types of community based distros can put out a out a linux desktop distro of high quality. Nobody gets rich doing it; maybe a few key devs find ways to leverage their participation into a career capable of supporting themselves. Given this market history, I think it will be very difficult for any commercial enterprise to effectively compete in the linux desktop arena with these community distros.