Mandriva’s future?

Now that my blog is not aggregated anymore on Planet Mandriva, I can safely express my opinion about Mandriva’s future without offending too many people.

Recently it became clear that Mandriva was once again in serious financial trouble. Mandriva 2010.1 was even delayed because of that, although not much explanation was given. In the end the company was saved by a new investor, but how things will involve in the more long-term, remains unclear.

Probably because of the financial crisis and the uncertainty of the future of the company, more and more employees started leaving the company, among them some people who played a very important role in the development of the distribution and who have been working for Mandriva for a very long time. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

Employees seem to be unhappy because of their doubts of the future of the company and once even the most faithful employees have the impression that the ship starts sinking, everyone leaves as fast as possible. Because nobody wants to be the last one and go down with the ship… Some of them clearly expressed their frustration with the management of the company in their goodbye message sent to the public mailing lists. There have not been any indications that these employees are being replaced.

The last few years Mandriva had always trouble keeping up with the other big distributions because of lack of staff and that will only become worse now that the company faces more cost cuttings. Does this distribution still have a future? I am not sure whether the company will still continue investing in the distribution. Actually I think it is a waste of money investing in something which will always lag behind the competition. Maybe the company could drop the distribution and specialize in Linux services. On the other hand, I am not sure what is the chance of succeeding if you throw away the main product for which you are best known. Anyway, I can believe that the Mandriva distribution would survive even if the company stopped working on it because right now a lot of work is already being done by external contributors.

Now I have the feeling that Mandriva is not much more anymore than any of those smaller alternative distributions, like PCLinuxOS or Slackware. Those distributions will always have their share of fans but they do not play a significant role in the development of Linux. Already for several years most real innovations happen under the impulse of companies like Red Hat and Novell. Mandriva’s reputation has been very problematic for a long time already and this will definitely not improve after all what is happening now.

I have used Mandriva with pleasure on all my machines for about 10 years and I have always strongly defended the distribution in the past when people criticized it. But now I can only conclude that for me Mandriva does not have any future anymore and that it is time to move on.

So thank you to all the people who made Mandriva such a great distribution in the past and thanks to whom I learned a lot about Linux in those 10 years. I wish them all the best now and in the future!