Tag: Mandriva

Now a few weeks after my first article about Mandriva’s future things have even more moved in a negative direction. The new management has decided to close down Edge-IT, a company which was bought by Mandriva several years ago. Apparently lots of the employees working on the distribution, were in fact Edge-IT employees and so they now have to leave the sinking ship. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

As is summarized by a mailing list post, Mandriva as being a distribution developed by a company and paid employees, is now an empty box. There is no more head in charge of the future direction of the distribution, who can take the necessary decisions for new releases. It looks like no more paid employees are working on GNOME and KDE packaging, and most people working on the installer and Mandriva’s configuration tools are gone. Looking at the SVN commit history it seems like the members of the security team are almost the only paid employees still working on the distribution. One can safely say that Mandriva is now de facto already a community developed distribution.

In the meantime, the CEO has reacted on a bug report. He says that Mandriva will concentrate on the server market in Europe and on the desktop market in countries like Brazil. Because European developers would have refused to be part of that future direction, they have been fired, according to the CEO. Of course this does not make any sense. There no reason why developers in Europe could not be working on the desktop if the target market for the desktop is mostly Brazil. The real reason why people are being fired, is of course that there is simply no more money to pay them anymore. Furthermore, I am pretty sure that Mandriva can never be a real competitor for distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Server, which are much more popular in large companies. Already even 5 years ago Mandriva was often not taken seriously anymore in corporate environments, according to my experience when working for an IT company specializing in free software. Even free distributions like CentOS and Debian have a much higher reputation in the server market than Mandriva.

Tomorrow there will be a shareholder’s meeting. After that, we might have a clear view on the future of Mandriva as a company. But there should not be much doubt: Mandriva as a distribution developed by the company, has already died now.

And Mandriva as being a communtiy developed distribution? It might work if some solution is found for things like the build system and other infrastructure, now being provided by Mandriva. Maybe there will be a merger with one of these Mandriva forks like PCLinuxOS and Unity Linux. But I am convinced that these distributions currently only exist thanks to Mandriva and will definitely suffer a lot if there is no more upstream where they can copy packages from. So a merger with such a distribution will not magically fix all problems caused by Mandriva’s death. People who are looking for a distribution to install on their system, should rather remove Mandriva from their shortlist, because there are too much doubts about its 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!