Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
On Friday 15 March 2002 17:24, wolfgang typed: People in the Mandrake Newsgroup just try to convince me that such is the real Mandrake forum, open to everything. They regard these mailinglists as too boring. Seems like I'm growing old wobo -- Saturday 16 March 2002 -- 07:12hrs cst Naw wobo, all the groups have merit...hang in there. you just got in with people who live to disagree. stay positive later -- Olly P. Biloxi Mississippi Linux MDK 8.0 and 2.4.3-20 mdk Kmail 2.1.1 ATX Plll 600mhz Asus CUBX ...384m PC133ram Sat Mar 16 07:15:56 EST 2002 The men sat sipping their tea in silence. 7:15am up 6 days, 4:17, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
On Fri, 15 Mar 2002 00:14:33 -0500, sda [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 02:50:14PM +1100, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: On Tue, 12 Mar 2002 22:07:54 -0500, Michael Osten [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Some where in the universe on Tue, 12 Mar 2002 19:26:54 -0700 Lorne Shantz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well said. I have made my contribution to help. I figure I've gotten lots of fun from this version. Now what really makes me crazy is after helping them out I would at least like to be able to leave Mandrake a test report. The web site says I need to give them more money to do that!?!?!? Am I missing something, or is that a work in progress. How long has Mandrake been around? It would seem that they were doing fine on a smaller budget before. The only Linux companies that are going to be around in the near future are the ones that can be operated within their means. I don't know one pure GNU/Linux company that can truthfully claim to be operating within their means. Even Red Hat, which is probably the most viable company right now, is still indebted to venture capitalists. Mandrakesoft has never been profitable, and past (mis)management by former CEO Henri Poole made this worse. They are still on track to become profitable by the end of the year, but not without laying off some workers. They don't want to do this, hence their plea for help. Mandrake is not dying, it just doesn't want to downsize its workforce to become profitable. How exactly are they on track to being profitable if they have a shorterm cash crunch?! Does anybody not see the irony in this? Exactly how do they intend to become profitable? They can only become profitable if they a/ increase revenue substantially b/ layoff employees [cut overhead c/ combination of both. Now, I can hardly see them making moves that would increase the revenue that would impact by the end of the fiscal year, [through sales, unless this plea is one that been incorporated in the business plan]. Here's the deal according to how I see it. Mandrake are currently losing money, and has done so since its inception. Mandrake have an opportunity to become profitable by the end of the year, but only if they lay off some staff. If they don't, they are destined to stay in debt. Mandrake is asking for people to join the Mandrake Club so that they can continue to hire as many people as they do now. They are _not_ asking for donations, as some seem to believe. The Mandrake Club offers many benefits to members, and IMHO is very good value for money. With a Mandrake Club membership, all of your money goes to Mandrakesoft, whereas with a boxed set much of the cost goes to others (distributors, packagers, retailers, etc.). I see nothing wrong in Mandrake asking people to purchase such a membership, particularly when given their excellent reputation for supporting free software. Everything they make is GPL, unlike some products from the other major distro companies. In other words, all of your money will be channeled back into creating free software (and repaying debt, of course) and into hiring developers to create this software. Don't get me wrong, I like Mandrake, but I only wish to contribute if I can see that I'm simply NOT throwing money to a ship which will go down anyway. I've previously purchased the 8.0 powerpak, but wasn't too happy with the MandrakeExpert support, basically it was useless, so I'm not really sure why I paid the extra $$ for it. MandrakeExpert is volunteer-based support, not unlike this mailing list. It is not a professional service. -- Sridhar Dhanapalan What's this script doing? unzip ; touch ; finger ; mount ; gasp ; yes ; umount ; sleep. Hint: not everything is computer-oriented. Sometimes you're in a sleeping bag, camping out with your girlfriend. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
RE: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
As I said before I mean no disrespect to anyone but please please take this thread off the expert@mandrake list... this is not a discussion suitable for this list and there are better forums for it. Regards, Dominic Baines -Original Message- From: Sridhar Dhanapalan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 15 March 2002 11:59 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake On Fri, 15 Mar 2002 00:14:33 -0500, sda [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 02:50:14PM +1100, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: On Tue, 12 Mar 2002 22:07:54 -0500, Michael Osten [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Some where in the universe on Tue, 12 Mar 2002 19:26:54 -0700 Lorne Shantz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well said. I have made my contribution to help. I figure I've gotten lots of fun from this version. Now what really makes me crazy is after helping them out I would at least like to be able to leave Mandrake a test report. The web site says I need to give them more money to do that!?!?!? Am I missing something, or is that a work in progress. How long has Mandrake been around? It would seem that they were doing fine on a smaller budget before. The only Linux companies that are going to be around in the near future are the ones that can be operated within their means. I don't know one pure GNU/Linux company that can truthfully claim to be operating within their means. Even Red Hat, which is probably the most viable company right now, is still indebted to venture capitalists. Mandrakesoft has never been profitable, and past (mis)management by former CEO Henri Poole made this worse. They are still on track to become profitable by the end of the year, but not without laying off some workers. They don't want to do this, hence their plea for help. Mandrake is not dying, it just doesn't want to downsize its workforce to become profitable. How exactly are they on track to being profitable if they have a shorterm cash crunch?! Does anybody not see the irony in this? Exactly how do they intend to become profitable? They can only become profitable if they a/ increase revenue substantially b/ layoff employees [cut overhead c/ combination of both. Now, I can hardly see them making moves that would increase the revenue that would impact by the end of the fiscal year, [through sales, unless this plea is one that been incorporated in the business plan]. Here's the deal according to how I see it. Mandrake are currently losing money, and has done so since its inception. Mandrake have an opportunity to become profitable by the end of the year, but only if they lay off some staff. If they don't, they are destined to stay in debt. Mandrake is asking for people to join the Mandrake Club so that they can continue to hire as many people as they do now. They are _not_ asking for donations, as some seem to believe. The Mandrake Club offers many benefits to members, and IMHO is very good value for money. With a Mandrake Club membership, all of your money goes to Mandrakesoft, whereas with a boxed set much of the cost goes to others (distributors, packagers, retailers, etc.). I see nothing wrong in Mandrake asking people to purchase such a membership, particularly when given their excellent reputation for supporting free software. Everything they make is GPL, unlike some products from the other major distro companies. In other words, all of your money will be channeled back into creating free software (and repaying debt, of course) and into hiring developers to create this software. Don't get me wrong, I like Mandrake, but I only wish to contribute if I can see that I'm simply NOT throwing money to a ship which will go down anyway. I've previously purchased the 8.0 powerpak, but wasn't too happy with the MandrakeExpert support, basically it was useless, so I'm not really sure why I paid the extra $$ for it. MandrakeExpert is volunteer-based support, not unlike this mailing list. It is not a professional service. -- Sridhar Dhanapalan What's this script doing? unzip ; touch ; finger ; mount ; gasp ; yes ; umount ; sleep. Hint: not everything is computer-oriented. Sometimes you're in a sleeping bag, camping out with your girlfriend. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
On Wed, 2002-03-13 at 01:26, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: IIRC, he tried to expand Mandrakesoft into areas like e-learning and support, and this came at the expense of their core GNU/Linux distribution business. Since Mandrakesoft was (and still is) still a small, heavily indebted and unprofitable company, its first objective should have been to reach profitability. The moral of the story is that it's best to stick to your core strengths, and then cautiously expand only when things have stabilised. Red Hat has done that, and now they are profitable. Henri Poole was following the path of many dot coms, even though many of them had failed by that stage (the boom was over). -- Sridhar Dhanapalan The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line. Sridhar, I find this a powerful analysis of Red Hat in a nutshell. Transgaming is using a subscription model right now for it's business; the CEO is Gavriel State (I think). I subscribed to Transgaming in order to get some winblows stuff (like my password manager) running as well as some of the games. I've never regretted doing this. A distribution is of course much more important than a package alone. Therefore it's that much more important (from my standpoint) that I subscribe to Mandrake. It's important to do so for more than one reason; another one is that they support this list, and therefore all the activity therein. If we'd like to continue to talk to each other in a technical way (and sometimes a social one), I think that it's time for some activism. There will be those that don't care, and the occasional pinhead; but for the most part, I've been simply astounded by the quality of the subscribers of this list in the respect that they want not only to help each other, but also are willing to shell out some hard earned clams for the distribution they love. _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
The thread from hell. It takes a lickin but keeps on tickin Keep up the great job boys and girls -- J. Craig Woods UNIX/NT Network/System Administration -Art is the illusion of spontaneity- Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
On Fri, 15 Mar 2002 11:00:13 -0600 J. Craig Woods [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The thread from hell. It takes a lickin but keeps on tickin Keep up the great job boys and girls -- J. Craig Woods UNIX/NT Network/System Administration -Art is the illusion of spontaneity- Next we are discussing VI verses Emacs (and yes I'm as bad as anyone on this thread.) James Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
On Thu, Mar 14, 2002 at 18:25 +1100, Darren King wrote: These analogies are hilarious. When you buy a car do they tell you it'll never needs gas? No. You know that going in. When you downloaded linux did you think you'd have to pay? Linux was started by people who did it for the fun of it. Where has that gone? It's still there. You can always get a Gnu/Linux (according to RMS) on the internet. Get a kernel, get all the apps and install your Linux from scratch. Then you don't owe anything to anybody. Maybe to the author of the HOWTO you may need to read before. You see, there is a difference between pure Linux and a distribution. You don't pay for Linux, you pay for packaging, for the installation programm, for the documentation and for the CDs and the box if you don't download. But you are the one to decide for you, which way you want it. And nobody, NOBODY ever said: Darren, come here and pay, or else...! wobo -- Registered Linux User 228909 Powered By Mandrake Linux 8.1 - Computers are userfriendly if you can use them without thinking. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
RE: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake- Please can we stop this thread appaearing in this list :-)
I mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone but please, please, please, please can we take this discussion AWAY from the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list there are much better forums for this, several posters have suggested those already :-) Whatever your views are about Mandrake policy this not the place for them. Regards, Dominic For those that may ask... I've decided it was time to go and buy copies of Mandrake, or RedHat or Slackware for all the systems they are on here instead of continuing the practice of the single/dual CD and use it over and over again option we all use/abuse. I still download the latest as it's faster for me but now will order the proper release when available. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
I've got some idea to explain why paying for a distro could be reasoned: The main idea is to have the source open as mentioned several times. We want Linux to grow and prosper. So we're forming a community with some sort of membership fees to additionally empower the open source idea with money. It's just the idea of one for all and all for one transferred. Anybody can think of many concepts of membership fees, buying a distro could certainly be considered to be one. ciao Thorsten Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
On 13 Mar 2002 17:54:14 +1100 Darren King [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There seems to be a movement to guilt linux users into paying for linux these days since it's so good but we didn't buy it. If I wanted to pay for an OS, I would. I don't so I use linux. Linux vendors like Mandrake should not have tried to become profitable corporations by selling a product anyone can legally get for free. Darren ummm and what other kind of company is there besides profitable... oh yeah a dot bomb. forgot about those. On Wed, 2002-03-13 at 16:08, James wrote: On this note a comment if I may... I've seen a lot of talk about free as in beer. Well don't know where you come from but in my neck of the woods beer that is free today requires that I buy a round later. In my business I'm trying to Sell software management. To many of the VAR's (Value Added Resellers) I see just buy a single copy of RH or Mandrake and then install it on box after box, after box. To make matters worse they expect RH and Mandrake to support it. Partially this is in my opinion the distro's own fault, because in the past they have supported it. I've bought every box set since 7.0 and one per box I install it on. Why because I don't expect MD or anyone else to support software that I didn't buy. From my view Mandrake needs the following. 1. DON'T even think about supporting users who don't buy the copy. Free support in the e-mail groups ok... but if they call sell em a support contract. 2. Improve the ability to upgrade a running system. I've got several 7.1 and 7,2 systems that I'd love to upgrade but can't afford the time to rebuild them after a wipe and install. Data gets in the way. (One box has over 5 gigs of Twiki pages alone.) This costs Mandrake money because I'm not buying box sets, but rather upgrading manually a piece at a time. 3. CO-OP advertising. SuSe RH and Mandrake are all in a bit of a bind. Why not pool the funds so to speak and do Linux adds... Scene opens a guy asleep in bed. Words appear on the screen. This is your IT dept at 1am thanks to Linux. Just my 2 cents James *** Amazon.com save 17 million last quarter by switching to Linux. why is your company still running that other OS? On 12 Mar 2002 21:13:12 -0500 Lyvim Xaphir [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 2002-03-12 at 10:55, Dave Salovesh wrote: First, my apologies to any here who may have already heard this through other channels, and I also ask your forgiveness if I've missed a thread here where this is being discussed. And lastly, I hope you don't worry that it might not be most inappropriate for a part-time Mandrake nobody and full-time NT/2000/MS-SQL/IIS admin to bring this up. Unfortunately I did not see your post, and posted an alternative story on The Register to the list. But I'm glad that others are taking note of this and taking it to heart. I too think it would be very bad for everybody as a whole and especially bad for the members of this list if MandrakeSoft hit a wall. I think it's time for anybody that cares to become active in their support of MandrakeSoft. Loki bit the dust recently, with some employees not having gotten a paycheck since sometime in 2000. Can anyone say loyalty? Mission Critical Linux went down, with the loss of 55 employees. The financial burden is a cross that the Linux world needs to learn how to bear; and fast; it's not too late. MandrakeSoft itself is now activating it's warning lights to give everyone a heads up. The now-unemployed people loved their companies. Their dedication was plain to see. How dedicated are you when you cut back on your groceries for two years just to keep working? For free? I feel that the people of MandrakeSoft are no different with respect for the love they have both for their distribution and their company; it shines through in the product that they produce. If we want to preserve this corporate identity in our marketplace, and continue to enjoy the Mandrake releases, then I personally believe it's time for those of us that care enough to show our support for Mandrake by joining the club. At one time, Windows sold for 200 US$ a copy. For that much money, you could have a 3.3 year subscription to the Mandrake club. It's only 5$ a month; less than the cost of alot of magazine subscriptions. See: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/mdkfuture.php3 It seems Mandrake is coming into a financially rough stretch. From their announcement: Even though all of us here at MandrakeSoft are excited about the upcoming release, we've also been distracted by financial concerns. Despite continuous good reviews in the press; despite having millions of users throughout the world; despite producing an award-winning Linux distribution
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
then again, maybe some of us should consider that the free lunches in life are prepared by someone, and served by some one, do you not tip a waiteress? or maybe the should not bother to bring your food since they only might get tipped? how dumd could it be to try and make a living thru the normally good graces of folks. I also wonder if you consider that you should pay for cable tv since the wire is already at the house? On Wednesday 13 March 2002 01:54, you wrote: There seems to be a movement to guilt linux users into paying for linux these days since it's so good but we didn't buy it. If I wanted to pay for an OS, I would. I don't so I use linux. Linux vendors like Mandrake should not have tried to become profitable corporations by selling a product anyone can legally get for free. Darren On Wed, 2002-03-13 at 16:08, James wrote: On this note a comment if I may... I've seen a lot of talk about free as in beer. Well don't know where you come from but in my neck of the woods beer that is free today requires that I buy a round later. In my business I'm trying to Sell software management. To many of the VAR's (Value Added Resellers) I see just buy a single copy of RH or Mandrake and then install it on box after box, after box. To make matters worse they expect RH and Mandrake to support it. Partially this is in my opinion the distro's own fault, because in the past they have supported it. I've bought every box set since 7.0 and one per box I install it on. Why because I don't expect MD or anyone else to support software that I didn't buy. From my view Mandrake needs the following. 1. DON'T even think about supporting users who don't buy the copy. Free support in the e-mail groups ok... but if they call sell em a support contract. 2. Improve the ability to upgrade a running system. I've got several 7.1 and 7,2 systems that I'd love to upgrade but can't afford the time to rebuild them after a wipe and install. Data gets in the way. (One box has over 5 gigs of Twiki pages alone.) This costs Mandrake money because I'm not buying box sets, but rather upgrading manually a piece at a time. 3. CO-OP advertising. SuSe RH and Mandrake are all in a bit of a bind. Why not pool the funds so to speak and do Linux adds... Scene opens a guy asleep in bed. Words appear on the screen. This is your IT dept at 1am thanks to Linux. Just my 2 cents James *** Amazon.com save 17 million last quarter by switching to Linux. why is your company still running that other OS? On 12 Mar 2002 21:13:12 -0500 Lyvim Xaphir [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 2002-03-12 at 10:55, Dave Salovesh wrote: First, my apologies to any here who may have already heard this through other channels, and I also ask your forgiveness if I've missed a thread here where this is being discussed. And lastly, I hope you don't worry that it might not be most inappropriate for a part-time Mandrake nobody and full-time NT/2000/MS-SQL/IIS admin to bring this up. Unfortunately I did not see your post, and posted an alternative story on The Register to the list. But I'm glad that others are taking note of this and taking it to heart. I too think it would be very bad for everybody as a whole and especially bad for the members of this list if MandrakeSoft hit a wall. I think it's time for anybody that cares to become active in their support of MandrakeSoft. Loki bit the dust recently, with some employees not having gotten a paycheck since sometime in 2000. Can anyone say loyalty? Mission Critical Linux went down, with the loss of 55 employees. The financial burden is a cross that the Linux world needs to learn how to bear; and fast; it's not too late. MandrakeSoft itself is now activating it's warning lights to give everyone a heads up. The now-unemployed people loved their companies. Their dedication was plain to see. How dedicated are you when you cut back on your groceries for two years just to keep working? For free? I feel that the people of MandrakeSoft are no different with respect for the love they have both for their distribution and their company; it shines through in the product that they produce. If we want to preserve this corporate identity in our marketplace, and continue to enjoy the Mandrake releases, then I personally believe it's time for those of us that care enough to show our support for Mandrake by joining the club. At one time, Windows sold for 200 US$ a copy. For that much money, you could have a 3.3 year subscription to the Mandrake club. It's only 5$ a month; less than the cost of alot of magazine subscriptions. See: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/mdkfuture.php3 It seems Mandrake is coming into a financially rough stretch. From their announcement: Even
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
Not all of us live in North America. In Australia, you do not tip. Waitesses are paid a decent wage here. Just because a cable is at a house for TV, doesn't mean it's on...I don't get the analogy. The whole fun of linux is that it's made by people who want to do it, in their spare time. Tell me, how much money does Mandrake send down to the people who actually write software that they include in their distro? And Im not talking about mandrake-specific softare. Darren On Wed, 2002-03-13 at 22:59, ed tharp wrote: then again, maybe some of us should consider that the free lunches in life are prepared by someone, and served by some one, do you not tip a waiteress? or maybe the should not bother to bring your food since they only might get tipped? how dumd could it be to try and make a living thru the normally good graces of folks. I also wonder if you consider that you should pay for cable tv since the wire is already at the house? On Wednesday 13 March 2002 01:54, you wrote: There seems to be a movement to guilt linux users into paying for linux these days since it's so good but we didn't buy it. If I wanted to pay for an OS, I would. I don't so I use linux. Linux vendors like Mandrake should not have tried to become profitable corporations by selling a product anyone can legally get for free. Darren On Wed, 2002-03-13 at 16:08, James wrote: On this note a comment if I may... I've seen a lot of talk about free as in beer. Well don't know where you come from but in my neck of the woods beer that is free today requires that I buy a round later. In my business I'm trying to Sell software management. To many of the VAR's (Value Added Resellers) I see just buy a single copy of RH or Mandrake and then install it on box after box, after box. To make matters worse they expect RH and Mandrake to support it. Partially this is in my opinion the distro's own fault, because in the past they have supported it. I've bought every box set since 7.0 and one per box I install it on. Why because I don't expect MD or anyone else to support software that I didn't buy. From my view Mandrake needs the following. 1. DON'T even think about supporting users who don't buy the copy. Free support in the e-mail groups ok... but if they call sell em a support contract. 2. Improve the ability to upgrade a running system. I've got several 7.1 and 7,2 systems that I'd love to upgrade but can't afford the time to rebuild them after a wipe and install. Data gets in the way. (One box has over 5 gigs of Twiki pages alone.) This costs Mandrake money because I'm not buying box sets, but rather upgrading manually a piece at a time. 3. CO-OP advertising. SuSe RH and Mandrake are all in a bit of a bind. Why not pool the funds so to speak and do Linux adds... Scene opens a guy asleep in bed. Words appear on the screen. This is your IT dept at 1am thanks to Linux. Just my 2 cents James *** Amazon.com save 17 million last quarter by switching to Linux. why is your company still running that other OS? On 12 Mar 2002 21:13:12 -0500 Lyvim Xaphir [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 2002-03-12 at 10:55, Dave Salovesh wrote: First, my apologies to any here who may have already heard this through other channels, and I also ask your forgiveness if I've missed a thread here where this is being discussed. And lastly, I hope you don't worry that it might not be most inappropriate for a part-time Mandrake nobody and full-time NT/2000/MS-SQL/IIS admin to bring this up. Unfortunately I did not see your post, and posted an alternative story on The Register to the list. But I'm glad that others are taking note of this and taking it to heart. I too think it would be very bad for everybody as a whole and especially bad for the members of this list if MandrakeSoft hit a wall. I think it's time for anybody that cares to become active in their support of MandrakeSoft. Loki bit the dust recently, with some employees not having gotten a paycheck since sometime in 2000. Can anyone say loyalty? Mission Critical Linux went down, with the loss of 55 employees. The financial burden is a cross that the Linux world needs to learn how to bear; and fast; it's not too late. MandrakeSoft itself is now activating it's warning lights to give everyone a heads up. The now-unemployed people loved their companies. Their dedication was plain to see. How dedicated are you when you cut back on your groceries for two years just to keep working? For free? I feel that the people of MandrakeSoft are no different with respect for the love they have both for their distribution and their company; it shines through in the product that they produce. If we want to
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
Darren King wrote: Not all of us live in North America. In Australia, you do not tip. Waitesses are paid a decent wage here. Just because a cable is at a house for TV, doesn't mean it's on...I don't get the analogy. The whole fun of linux is that it's made by people who want to do it, in their spare time. Tell me, how much money does Mandrake send down to the people who actually write software that they include in their distro? And Im not talking about mandrake-specific softare. Darren On Wed, 2002-03-13 at 22:59, ed tharp wrote: then again, maybe some of us should consider that the free lunches in life are prepared by someone, and served by some one, do you not tip a waiteress? or maybe the should not bother to bring your food since they only might get tipped? how dumd could it be to try and make a living thru the normally good graces of folks. I also wonder if you consider that you should pay for cable tv since the wire is already at the house? On Wednesday 13 March 2002 01:54, you wrote: There seems to be a movement to guilt linux users into paying for linux these days since it's so good but we didn't buy it. If I wanted to pay for an OS, I would. I don't so I use linux. Linux vendors like Mandrake should not have tried to become profitable corporations by selling a product anyone can legally get for free. Darren On Wed, 2002-03-13 at 16:08, James wrote: On this note a comment if I may... I've seen a lot of talk about free as in beer. Well don't know where you come from but in my neck of the woods beer that is free today requires that I buy a round later. In my business I'm trying to Sell software management. To many of the VAR's (Value Added Resellers) I see just buy a single copy of RH or Mandrake and then install it on box after box, after box. To make matters worse they expect RH and Mandrake to support it. Partially this is in my opinion the distro's own fault, because in the past they have supported it. I've bought every box set since 7.0 and one per box I install it on. Why because I don't expect MD or anyone else to support software that I didn't buy. From my view Mandrake needs the following. 1. DON'T even think about supporting users who don't buy the copy. Free support in the e-mail groups ok... but if they call sell em a support contract. 2. Improve the ability to upgrade a running system. I've got several 7.1 and 7,2 systems that I'd love to upgrade but can't afford the time to rebuild them after a wipe and install. Data gets in the way. (One box has over 5 gigs of Twiki pages alone.) This costs Mandrake money because I'm not buying box sets, but rather upgrading manually a piece at a time. 3. CO-OP advertising. SuSe RH and Mandrake are all in a bit of a bind. Why not pool the funds so to speak and do Linux adds... Scene opens a guy asleep in bed. Words appear on the screen. This is your IT dept at 1am thanks to Linux. Just my 2 cents James *** Amazon.com save 17 million last quarter by switching to Linux. why is your company still running that other OS? On 12 Mar 2002 21:13:12 -0500 Lyvim Xaphir [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 2002-03-12 at 10:55, Dave Salovesh wrote: First, my apologies to any here who may have already heard this through other channels, and I also ask your forgiveness if I've missed a thread here where this is being discussed. And lastly, I hope you don't worry that it might not be most inappropriate for a part-time Mandrake nobody and full-time NT/2000/MS-SQL/IIS admin to bring this up. Unfortunately I did not see your post, and posted an alternative story on The Register to the list. But I'm glad that others are taking note of this and taking it to heart. I too think it would be very bad for everybody as a whole and especially bad for the members of this list if MandrakeSoft hit a wall. I think it's time for anybody that cares to become active in their support of MandrakeSoft. Loki bit the dust recently, with some employees not having gotten a paycheck since sometime in 2000. Can anyone say loyalty? Mission Critical Linux went down, with the loss of 55 employees. The financial burden is a cross that the Linux world needs to learn how to bear; and fast; it's not too late. MandrakeSoft itself is now activating it's warning lights to give everyone a heads up. The now-unemployed people loved their companies. Their dedication was plain to see. How dedicated are you when you cut back on your groceries for two years just to keep working? For free? I feel that the people of MandrakeSoft are no different with respect for the love they have both for their distribution and their company; it shines through in the product that they produce. If we want to preserve this corporate identity in our marketplace, and continue to enjoy the Mandrake releases, then I personally believe it's time for those of us that care enough to show our support for Mandrake by joining the club. At one time, Windows
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday 13 March 2002 7:30 pm, you wrote: Not all of us live in North America. In Australia, you do not tip. Waitesses are paid a decent wage here. Just because a cable is at a house for TV, doesn't mean it's on...I don't get the analogy. The whole fun of linux is that it's made by people who want to do it, in their spare time. Tell me, how much money does Mandrake send down to the people who actually write software that they include in their distro? And Im not talking about mandrake-specific softare. I know for a fact they sponsor (pay a full time wage) for people working on KDE, the kernel, and the prelude projects (i remember reading this on their website). I believe they also pay partial salaries for more people on other projects also. Dont forget that the mandrake specific software (mainly control center and hardware auto detection stuff) is very good, and they release it under GPL for other distributors to use i they wish. SuSE (for example) has a proprietry configuration tool, although they also sponser the linux dvd project, and other developers as well. Mandrakesoft does give a good bit of money back to the community, and provides us with a distribution of the highest quality. If anyone here ever installed an old (pre red hat 5) distribution then they can understand the work that mandrakesoft has put into their software. Sadly, i am currently a student and cant afford to pay the monthly contributions (i could if i didnt have to pay in a lump sum - note for guys at mandrake), however i encouraged my mother to pay for a boxed set of 8.1 when i installed linux for her at home, and i had purchased a boxed set of 7.1 a while back, so i am trying to support the best i can. All i can say is that i hope the company gets through this hard time, and doesnt waste any of the money that it recieves from the good pepole of the community. Good Luck Tom Badran -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8j8jZXCpWOla2mCcRAvxIAJ49lsBYOe2y6kYED4V29ZQVT02t2gCeJzvy bT2Ow2NgvTIsD4ovVupPCe0= =eGSo -END PGP SIGNATURE- Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
On Wednesday 13 March 2002 02:29 pm, you wrote: Darren King wrote: Not all of us live in North America. In Australia, you do not tip. Waitesses are paid a decent wage here. Just because a cable is at a house for TV, doesn't mean it's on...I don't get the analogy. The whole fun of linux is that it's made by people who want to do it, in their spare time. Tell me, how much money does Mandrake send down to the people who actually write software that they include in their distro? And Im not talking about mandrake-specific softare. Darren On Wed, 2002-03-13 at 22:59, ed tharp wrote: then again, maybe some of us should consider that the free lunches in life are prepared by someone, and served by some one, do you not tip a waiteress? or maybe the should not bother to bring your food since they only might get tipped? how dumd could it be to try and make a living thru the normally good graces of folks. I also wonder if you consider that you should pay for cable tv since the wire is already at the house? On Wednesday 13 March 2002 01:54, you wrote: There seems to be a movement to guilt linux users into paying for linux these days since it's so good but we didn't buy it. If I wanted to pay for an OS, I would. I don't so I use linux. Linux vendors like Mandrake should not have tried to become profitable corporations by selling a product anyone can legally get for free. Darren On Wed, 2002-03-13 at 16:08, James wrote: On this note a comment if I may... I've seen a lot of talk about free as in beer. Well don't know where you come from but in my neck of the woods beer that is free today requires that I buy a round later. In my business I'm trying to Sell software management. To many of the VAR's (Value Added Resellers) I see just buy a single copy of RH or Mandrake and then install it on box after box, after box. To make matters worse they expect RH and Mandrake to support it. Partially this is in my opinion the distro's own fault, because in the past they have supported it. I've bought every box set since 7.0 and one per box I install it on. Why because I don't expect MD or anyone else to support software that I didn't buy. From my view Mandrake needs the following. 1. DON'T even think about supporting users who don't buy the copy. Free support in the e-mail groups ok... but if they call sell em a support contract. 2. Improve the ability to upgrade a running system. I've got several 7.1 and 7,2 systems that I'd love to upgrade but can't afford the time to rebuild them after a wipe and install. Data gets in the way. (One box has over 5 gigs of Twiki pages alone.) This costs Mandrake money because I'm not buying box sets, but rather upgrading manually a piece at a time. 3. CO-OP advertising. SuSe RH and Mandrake are all in a bit of a bind. Why not pool the funds so to speak and do Linux adds... Scene opens a guy asleep in bed. Words appear on the screen. This is your IT dept at 1am thanks to Linux. Just my 2 cents James *** Amazon.com save 17 million last quarter by switching to Linux. why is your company still running that other OS? On 12 Mar 2002 21:13:12 -0500 Lyvim Xaphir [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 2002-03-12 at 10:55, Dave Salovesh wrote: First, my apologies to any here who may have already heard this through other channels, and I also ask your forgiveness if I've missed a thread here where this is being discussed. And lastly, I hope you don't worry that it might not be most inappropriate for a part-time Mandrake nobody and full-time NT/2000/MS-SQL/IIS admin to bring this up. Unfortunately I did not see your post, and posted an alternative story on The Register to the list. But I'm glad that others are taking note of this and taking it to heart. I too think it would be very bad for everybody as a whole and especially bad for the members of this list if MandrakeSoft hit a wall. I think it's time for anybody that cares to become active in their support of MandrakeSoft. Loki bit the dust recently, with some employees not having gotten a paycheck since sometime in 2000. Can anyone say loyalty? Mission Critical Linux went down, with the loss of 55 employees. The financial burden is a cross that the Linux world needs to learn how to bear; and fast; it's not too late. MandrakeSoft itself is now activating it's warning lights to give everyone a heads up. The now-unemployed people loved their companies. Their dedication was plain to see. How dedicated are you when you cut back on your groceries for two years just to keep working? For free? I feel that the people of MandrakeSoft are no different with respect for the love they have both for their distribution and their company; it shines through in the product that they produce. If we want to preserve this corporate identity in our marketplace, and continue to enjoy the
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
On Wednesday 13 March 2002 14:30, you wrote: Not all of us live in North America. In Australia, you do not tip. Waitesses are paid a decent wage here. Just because a cable is at a house for TV, doesn't mean it's on...I don't get the analogy. The whole fun of linux is that it's made by people who want to do it, in their spare time. Tell me, how much money does Mandrake send down to the people who actually write software that they include in their distro? And Im not talking about mandrake-specific softare. Darren perhaps this is information that you should check out and consider yourself before you make any further rash statements. what I tell you , you may well decide is false, but what you find out foryorself may well enlighten you. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
Well, I've read the posts and after listening to everyone, I would like to add my point - which is - who cares? If you use mandrake and you like it, doesn't it make sense to support them? If you like driving your car, don't you put gas in it? What happens if you don't put gas in? C'mon now, all you 'experts', I know you know the answer to that one... cheers :-) -- Michael Tracy Holt Kirkland, WA[EMAIL PROTECTED] www.holt-tech.net [EMAIL PROTECTED] === Unix is all about taking big rocks and turning them into little rocks - Windows is all about taking sand... and dumping it in your gas tank... Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
On 14 Mar 2002 06:30:40 +1100 Darren King [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Not all of us live in North America. In Australia, you do not tip. Waitesses are paid a decent wage here. Just because a cable is at a house for TV, doesn't mean it's on...I don't get the analogy. The whole fun of linux is that it's made by people who want to do it, in their spare time. Tell me, how much money does Mandrake send down to the people who actually write software that they include in their distro? And Im not talking about mandrake-specific softare. Darren With all due respect probably more than you or I do. Such projects as Bastille, wine, KDE and others do get money, time and support from Mandrake. In fact Many of the project leaders for Open Source projects are employed by the various distros just to work on their project. (Tip by the way means Too Insure Promptness.. and when I was in Sydney the bartender was very very prompt after he got the first tip... *grin* ) Much of this falls along the same lines as the word fair. It means all is equal... not you get what you want. Before companies like ygdrasil (hope I spelled that right) and later RedHat et all. The only way to get the free OS was hours of boot strapping and compiling (Even more time consuming than LFS ) These vendors brought to the table 3 things, Installers, QA and support. I really don't care how much of a guru someone thinks they are, the still need support and benifit from the QA and the installer. If you want' it free then take what's free. Often buggy, in that it builds on the users box but not on someone elses. No notification of securitty holes. (Not even Cert catches them all.) Not tools such as RPM to make what could otherwise be an upgrade nightmare for sysadmins possible. No thanks I'll take what I get from the distro's over boot strap and 2 weeks compiling (per box I might add) anytime. Just remember TNSTAAFL. James On Wed, 2002-03-13 at 22:59, ed tharp wrote: then again, maybe some of us should consider that the free lunches in life are prepared by someone, and served by some one, do you not tip a waiteress? or maybe the should not bother to bring your food since they only might get tipped? how dumd could it be to try and make a living thru the normally good graces of folks. I also wonder if you consider that you should pay for cable tv since the wire is already at the house? On Wednesday 13 March 2002 01:54, you wrote: There seems to be a movement to guilt linux users into paying for linux these days since it's so good but we didn't buy it. If I wanted to pay for an OS, I would. I don't so I use linux. Linux vendors like Mandrake should not have tried to become profitable corporations by selling a product anyone can legally get for free. Darren On Wed, 2002-03-13 at 16:08, James wrote: On this note a comment if I may... I've seen a lot of talk about free as in beer. Well don't know where you come from but in my neck of the woods beer that is free today requires that I buy a round later. In my business I'm trying to Sell software management. To many of the VAR's (Value Added Resellers) I see just buy a single copy of RH or Mandrake and then install it on box after box, after box. To make matters worse they expect RH and Mandrake to support it. Partially this is in my opinion the distro's own fault, because in the past they have supported it. I've bought every box set since 7.0 and one per box I install it on. Why because I don't expect MD or anyone else to support software that I didn't buy. From my view Mandrake needs the following. 1. DON'T even think about supporting users who don't buy the copy. Free support in the e-mail groups ok... but if they call sell em a support contract. 2. Improve the ability to upgrade a running system. I've got several 7.1 and 7,2 systems that I'd love to upgrade but can't afford the time to rebuild them after a wipe and install. Data gets in the way. (One box has over 5 gigs of Twiki pages alone.) This costs Mandrake money because I'm not buying box sets, but rather upgrading manually a piece at a time. 3. CO-OP advertising. SuSe RH and Mandrake are all in a bit of a bind. Why not pool the funds so to speak and do Linux adds... Scene opens a guy asleep in bed. Words appear on the screen. This is your IT dept at 1am thanks to Linux. Just my 2 cents James *** Amazon.com save 17 million last quarter by switching to Linux. why is your company still running that other OS? On 12 Mar 2002 21:13:12 -0500 Lyvim Xaphir [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 2002-03-12 at 10:55, Dave Salovesh wrote: First, my apologies to any here who may have already heard this through other channels, and I also ask
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
On Thu, 2002-03-14 at 00:02, James wrote: With all due respect probably more than you or I do. Such projects as Bastille, wine, KDE and others do get money, time and support from Mandrake. In fact Many of the project leaders for Open Source projects are employed by the various distros just to work on their project. (Tip by the way means Too Insure Promptness.. and when I was in Sydney the bartender was very very prompt after he got the first tip... *grin* ) Much of this falls along the same lines as the word fair. It means all is equal... not you get what you want. Before companies like ygdrasil (hope I spelled that right) and later RedHat et all. The only way to get the free OS was hours of boot strapping and compiling (Even more time consuming than LFS ) These vendors brought to the table 3 things, Installers, QA and support. I really don't care how much of a guru someone thinks they are, the still need support and benefit from the QA and the installer. If you want' it free then take what's free. Often buggy, in that it builds on the users box but not on someone elses. No notification of securitty holes. (Not even Cert catches them all.) Not tools such as RPM to make what could otherwise be an upgrade nightmare for sysadmins possible. No thanks I'll take what I get from the distro's over boot strap and 2 weeks compiling (per box I might add) anytime. Just remember TNSTAAFL. James On Wed, 2002-03-13 at 22:59, ed tharp wrote: then again, maybe some of us should consider that the free lunches in life are prepared by someone, and served by some one, do you not tip a waiteress? or maybe the should not bother to bring your food since they only might get tipped? how dumd could it be to try and make a living thru the normally good graces of folks. I also wonder if you consider that you should pay for cable tv since the wire is already at the house? Personally, I've become amazed at how tight this list is when faced with adversity. Quite frankly, I consider the subscription to this list to be one of the best mailing list decisions I've ever made. The contributors here are definitely made of high quality stuff. Heck, it's almost enough to put you in a good mood. ;) If you're in a typing mood and you want to influence some more support for MandrakeSoft, check out this inflammatory article over at Newsforge: http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/03/13/0316257mode=thread You're allowed to post anonymous comments there regarding the article. Jack Bryar is pushing a very misinformed and negative outlook regarding the subscription model of business (Which Transgaming is using successfully now) and makes some very insulting allusions to MandrakeSoft's new business model. So if youre' in the mood, blast 'em. ;) Then when youre' done, come back to the list here to chill. :) _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
I don't know what you mean by rash, but I stand by what I say. You cannot use a standard business model when your product is free. How many people would use linux if it and all the apps had to be paid full price for? Would you pay 500 bucks for the gimp even though it's as good as Photoshop? I have been enlightened on Mandrake's commitment to the community and I applaud them for it. I was wrong there but I stand behind my point. Threatening to lay off worker unless we give them money is a bit low. Obviously they overextended themselves. Like most of us, they should wait till they actually have money until they buy something. I just don't like the whole we don't want to lay off employees so we'll appeal to users stance... Darren On Thu, 2002-03-14 at 11:55, ed tharp wrote: On Wednesday 13 March 2002 14:30, you wrote: Not all of us live in North America. In Australia, you do not tip. Waitesses are paid a decent wage here. Just because a cable is at a house for TV, doesn't mean it's on...I don't get the analogy. The whole fun of linux is that it's made by people who want to do it, in their spare time. Tell me, how much money does Mandrake send down to the people who actually write software that they include in their distro? And Im not talking about mandrake-specific softare. Darren perhaps this is information that you should check out and consider yourself before you make any further rash statements. what I tell you , you may well decide is false, but what you find out foryorself may well enlighten you. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
These analogies are hilarious. When you buy a car do they tell you it'll never needs gas? No. You know that going in. When you downloaded linux did you think you'd have to pay? Linux was started by people who did it for the fun of it. Where has that gone? Darren On Thu, 2002-03-14 at 13:15, Michael Holt wrote: Well, I've read the posts and after listening to everyone, I would like to add my point - which is - who cares? If you use mandrake and you like it, doesn't it make sense to support them? If you like driving your car, don't you put gas in it? What happens if you don't put gas in? C'mon now, all you 'experts', I know you know the answer to that one... cheers :-) -- Michael Tracy Holt Kirkland, WA[EMAIL PROTECTED] www.holt-tech.net [EMAIL PROTECTED] === Unix is all about taking big rocks and turning them into little rocks - Windows is all about taking sand... and dumping it in your gas tank... Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
I thought the article is bang on. I didn't find it inflammatory at all...what part did you find so? On Thu, 2002-03-14 at 17:32, Lyvim Xaphir wrote: Personally, I've become amazed at how tight this list is when faced with adversity. Quite frankly, I consider the subscription to this list to be one of the best mailing list decisions I've ever made. The contributors here are definitely made of high quality stuff. Heck, it's almost enough to put you in a good mood. ;) If you're in a typing mood and you want to influence some more support for MandrakeSoft, check out this inflammatory article over at Newsforge: http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/03/13/0316257mode=thread You're allowed to post anonymous comments there regarding the article. Jack Bryar is pushing a very misinformed and negative outlook regarding the subscription model of business (Which Transgaming is using successfully now) and makes some very insulting allusions to MandrakeSoft's new business model. So if youre' in the mood, blast 'em. ;) Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
[expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
First, my apologies to any here who may have already heard this through other channels, and I also ask your forgiveness if I've missed a thread here where this is being discussed. And lastly, I hope you don't worry that it might not be most inappropriate for a part-time Mandrake nobody and full-time NT/2000/MS-SQL/IIS admin to bring this up. It seems Mandrake is coming into a financially rough stretch. From their announcement: Even though all of us here at MandrakeSoft are excited about the upcoming release, we've also been distracted by financial concerns. Despite continuous good reviews in the press; despite having millions of users throughout the world; despite producing an award-winning Linux distribution that is a solid competitor to both UNIX and Window$, the Mandrake Linux distribution's short-term future is in jeopardy due to a simple factor: money. The address below takes you to the full announcement. In brief, the long-term future looks good, but only if Mandrake can stay strong until then. If they can't, they explain that they may need to make development staff cuts. That means that some regular voices of authority here might be losing their paychecks, which could really hurt this forum, not to mention what their departure might do to the long-term quality of Mandrake. They suggest we can join their user's clubs, and I'm sure that will help somewhat. http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/mdkfuture.php3 I also suggest we might find ways to add to their regular revenues. When 8.2 is released, perhaps that would be a good time to purchase a packaged copy instead of just snatching the ISO. Perhaps some of the larger enterprises who see that Mandrake is the best Linux replacement for Windows on the desktop can budget their own site license rate. Or perhaps now would be a good time to purchase a per-incident support option for later use. AND go join the user's clubs. Good luck, MandrakeSoft. (Oh, and -really- lastly, I KNOW everyone this message will reach is ALREADY supporting, and in support of, Mandrake, but I'm hoping this might spark some creative extensions of advocacy and $$$ support in certain quarters. For instance, my boss keeps asking if this stuff is really free-as-in-beer, and though the answer is yes of couse, today I'm going to remind him (again) of the pub etiquette that says you gotta buy a round every once in a while, and then pitch exactly what I've said above.) -- Dave Salovesh RAM Associates, Inc. (800) 543-3635 Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
On Tue, 2002-03-12 at 10:55, Dave Salovesh wrote: First, my apologies to any here who may have already heard this through other channels, and I also ask your forgiveness if I've missed a thread here where this is being discussed. And lastly, I hope you don't worry that it might not be most inappropriate for a part-time Mandrake nobody and full-time NT/2000/MS-SQL/IIS admin to bring this up. Unfortunately I did not see your post, and posted an alternative story on The Register to the list. But I'm glad that others are taking note of this and taking it to heart. I too think it would be very bad for everybody as a whole and especially bad for the members of this list if MandrakeSoft hit a wall. I think it's time for anybody that cares to become active in their support of MandrakeSoft. Loki bit the dust recently, with some employees not having gotten a paycheck since sometime in 2000. Can anyone say loyalty? Mission Critical Linux went down, with the loss of 55 employees. The financial burden is a cross that the Linux world needs to learn how to bear; and fast; it's not too late. MandrakeSoft itself is now activating it's warning lights to give everyone a heads up. The now-unemployed people loved their companies. Their dedication was plain to see. How dedicated are you when you cut back on your groceries for two years just to keep working? For free? I feel that the people of MandrakeSoft are no different with respect for the love they have both for their distribution and their company; it shines through in the product that they produce. If we want to preserve this corporate identity in our marketplace, and continue to enjoy the Mandrake releases, then I personally believe it's time for those of us that care enough to show our support for Mandrake by joining the club. At one time, Windows sold for 200 US$ a copy. For that much money, you could have a 3.3 year subscription to the Mandrake club. It's only 5$ a month; less than the cost of alot of magazine subscriptions. See: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/mdkfuture.php3 It seems Mandrake is coming into a financially rough stretch. From their announcement: Even though all of us here at MandrakeSoft are excited about the upcoming release, we've also been distracted by financial concerns. Despite continuous good reviews in the press; despite having millions of users throughout the world; despite producing an award-winning Linux distribution that is a solid competitor to both UNIX and Window$, the Mandrake Linux distribution's short-term future is in jeopardy due to a simple factor: money. _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
Well said. I have made my contribution to help. I figure I've gotten lots of fun from this version. Now what really makes me crazy is after helping them out I would at least like to be able to leave Mandrake a test report. The web site says I need to give them more money to do that!?!?!? Am I missing something, or is that a work in progress. Please everyone, let's help them out and hope they can make it through the summer. They are the best distro out there imho. Lyvim Xaphir wrote: On Tue, 2002-03-12 at 10:55, Dave Salovesh wrote: First, my apologies to any here who may have already heard this through other channels, and I also ask your forgiveness if I've missed a thread here where this is being discussed. And lastly, I hope you don't worry that it might not be most inappropriate for a part-time Mandrake nobody and full-time NT/2000/MS-SQL/IIS admin to bring this up. Unfortunately I did not see your post, and posted an alternative story on The Register to the list. But I'm glad that others are taking note of this and taking it to heart. I too think it would be very bad for everybody as a whole and especially bad for the members of this list if MandrakeSoft hit a wall. I think it's time for anybody that cares to become active in their support of MandrakeSoft. Loki bit the dust recently, with some employees not having gotten a paycheck since sometime in 2000. Can anyone say loyalty? Mission Critical Linux went down, with the loss of 55 employees. The financial burden is a cross that the Linux world needs to learn how to bear; and fast; it's not too late. MandrakeSoft itself is now activating it's warning lights to give everyone a heads up. The now-unemployed people loved their companies. Their dedication was plain to see. How dedicated are you when you cut back on your groceries for two years just to keep working? For free? I feel that the people of MandrakeSoft are no different with respect for the love they have both for their distribution and their company; it shines through in the product that they produce. If we want to preserve this corporate identity in our marketplace, and continue to enjoy the Mandrake releases, then I personally believe it's time for those of us that care enough to show our support for Mandrake by joining the club. At one time, Windows sold for 200 US$ a copy. For that much money, you could have a 3.3 year subscription to the Mandrake club. It's only 5$ a month; less than the cost of alot of magazine subscriptions. See: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/mdkfuture.php3 It seems Mandrake is coming into a financially rough stretch. From their announcement: Even though all of us here at MandrakeSoft are excited about the upcoming release, we've also been distracted by financial concerns. Despite continuous good reviews in the press; despite having millions of users throughout the world; despite producing an award-winning Linux distribution that is a solid competitor to both UNIX and Window$, the Mandrake Linux distribution's short-term future is in jeopardy due to a simple factor: money. _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com -- Lorne Shantz Note: Unfortunately if you send a message to me without it having my email address specifically in a to or CC: field, I will not see it. This is because of all the junk mail sent in this manner, so I've had to filter it. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
Some where in the universe on Tue, 12 Mar 2002 19:26:54 -0700 Lorne Shantz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well said. I have made my contribution to help. I figure I've gotten lots of fun from this version. Now what really makes me crazy is after helping them out I would at least like to be able to leave Mandrake a test report. The web site says I need to give them more money to do that!?!?!? Am I missing something, or is that a work in progress. How long has Mandrake been around? It would seem that they were doing fine on a smaller budget before. The only Linux companies that are going to be around in the near future are the ones that can be operated within their means. - - Michael Osten Reefedge Inc. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
On Tue, 2002-03-12 at 21:26, Lorne Shantz wrote: Well said. I have made my contribution to help. I figure I've gotten lots of fun from this version. Now what really makes me crazy is after helping them out I would at least like to be able to leave Mandrake a test report. The web site says I need to give them more money to do that!?!?!? Am I missing something, or is that a work in progress. Thanks. I've subscribed also; although I haven't seen the test report thing yet; I'll look for it. I've seen very good responses elsewhere for the Mandrake volundary subscription approach; I hope the trend continues to accellerate. It probably would help a great deal to spread the word either to your Mandrake running buddies or to interested parties in your Linux User's Group. I believe it's a chance for open source people to break the negative chains within capitalism, and direct the support in a very effective way to distributions that they (the people) deem the best. The advantage of this system is that the subscription funds are undiluted (as opposed to the revenue gathered by selling Mandrake distros thru retail outlets) and go directly to MandrakeSoft. This is an important distinction, because there are many things that can go wrong with revenue feedback thru retail distribution. It's an idea that has many possibilities with regard to the enhancement of capitalism. Another point is that the support for MandrakeSoft ends up being spread across an extremely wide user base, thus lowering the cost per person down to what we see (5$ per user), assuming that we help them meet their goals. Please everyone, let's help them out and hope they can make it through the summer. They are the best distro out there imho. Lyvim Xaphir wrote: On Tue, 2002-03-12 at 10:55, Dave Salovesh wrote: First, my apologies to any here who may have already heard this through other channels, and I also ask your forgiveness if I've missed a thread here where this is being discussed. And lastly, I hope you don't worry that it might not be most inappropriate for a part-time Mandrake nobody and full-time NT/2000/MS-SQL/IIS admin to bring this up. Unfortunately I did not see your post, and posted an alternative story on The Register to the list. But I'm glad that others are taking note of this and taking it to heart. I too think it would be very bad for everybody as a whole and especially bad for the members of this list if MandrakeSoft hit a wall. I think it's time for anybody that cares to become active in their support of MandrakeSoft. Loki bit the dust recently, with some employees not having gotten a paycheck since sometime in 2000. Can anyone say loyalty? Mission Critical Linux went down, with the loss of 55 employees. The financial burden is a cross that the Linux world needs to learn how to bear; and fast; it's not too late. MandrakeSoft itself is now activating it's warning lights to give everyone a heads up. The now-unemployed people loved their companies. Their dedication was plain to see. How dedicated are you when you cut back on your groceries for two years just to keep working? For free? I feel that the people of MandrakeSoft are no different with respect for the love they have both for their distribution and their company; it shines through in the product that they produce. If we want to preserve this corporate identity in our marketplace, and continue to enjoy the Mandrake releases, then I personally believe it's time for those of us that care enough to show our support for Mandrake by joining the club. At one time, Windows sold for 200 US$ a copy. For that much money, you could have a 3.3 year subscription to the Mandrake club. It's only 5$ a month; less than the cost of alot of magazine subscriptions. See: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/mdkfuture.php3 It seems Mandrake is coming into a financially rough stretch. From their announcement: Even though all of us here at MandrakeSoft are excited about the upcoming release, we've also been distracted by financial concerns. Despite continuous good reviews in the press; despite having millions of users throughout the world; despite producing an award-winning Linux distribution that is a solid competitor to both UNIX and Window$, the Mandrake Linux distribution's short-term future is in jeopardy due to a simple factor: money. _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com -- Lorne Shantz Note: Unfortunately if you send a message to me without it having my email address specifically in a to or CC: field, I will not see it. This is because of all the junk mail sent in this manner,
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
On Tue, 12 Mar 2002 22:07:54 -0500, Michael Osten [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Some where in the universe on Tue, 12 Mar 2002 19:26:54 -0700 Lorne Shantz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well said. I have made my contribution to help. I figure I've gotten lots of fun from this version. Now what really makes me crazy is after helping them out I would at least like to be able to leave Mandrake a test report. The web site says I need to give them more money to do that!?!?!? Am I missing something, or is that a work in progress. How long has Mandrake been around? It would seem that they were doing fine on a smaller budget before. The only Linux companies that are going to be around in the near future are the ones that can be operated within their means. I don't know one pure GNU/Linux company that can truthfully claim to be operating within their means. Even Red Hat, which is probably the most viable company right now, is still indebted to venture capitalists. Mandrakesoft has never been profitable, and past (mis)management by former CEO Henri Poole made this worse. They are still on track to become profitable by the end of the year, but not without laying off some workers. They don't want to do this, hence their plea for help. Mandrake is not dying, it just doesn't want to downsize its workforce to become profitable. -- Sridhar Dhanapalan The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 2nd ed, p.25 Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
Maybe I missed this one, what did CEO Henri Poole do that was bad for MandrakeSoft? JG I don't know one pure GNU/Linux company that can truthfully claim to be operating within their means. Even Red Hat, which is probably the most viable company right now, is still indebted to venture capitalists. Mandrakesoft has never been profitable, and past (mis)management by former CEO Henri Poole made this worse. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
On this note a comment if I may... I've seen a lot of talk about free as in beer. Well don't know where you come from but in my neck of the woods beer that is free today requires that I buy a round later. In my business I'm trying to Sell software management. To many of the VAR's (Value Added Resellers) I see just buy a single copy of RH or Mandrake and then install it on box after box, after box. To make matters worse they expect RH and Mandrake to support it. Partially this is in my opinion the distro's own fault, because in the past they have supported it. I've bought every box set since 7.0 and one per box I install it on. Why because I don't expect MD or anyone else to support software that I didn't buy. From my view Mandrake needs the following. 1. DON'T even think about supporting users who don't buy the copy. Free support in the e-mail groups ok... but if they call sell em a support contract. 2. Improve the ability to upgrade a running system. I've got several 7.1 and 7,2 systems that I'd love to upgrade but can't afford the time to rebuild them after a wipe and install. Data gets in the way. (One box has over 5 gigs of Twiki pages alone.) This costs Mandrake money because I'm not buying box sets, but rather upgrading manually a piece at a time. 3. CO-OP advertising. SuSe RH and Mandrake are all in a bit of a bind. Why not pool the funds so to speak and do Linux adds... Scene opens a guy asleep in bed. Words appear on the screen. This is your IT dept at 1am thanks to Linux. Just my 2 cents James *** Amazon.com save 17 million last quarter by switching to Linux. why is your company still running that other OS? On 12 Mar 2002 21:13:12 -0500 Lyvim Xaphir [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 2002-03-12 at 10:55, Dave Salovesh wrote: First, my apologies to any here who may have already heard this through other channels, and I also ask your forgiveness if I've missed a thread here where this is being discussed. And lastly, I hope you don't worry that it might not be most inappropriate for a part-time Mandrake nobody and full-time NT/2000/MS-SQL/IIS admin to bring this up. Unfortunately I did not see your post, and posted an alternative story on The Register to the list. But I'm glad that others are taking note of this and taking it to heart. I too think it would be very bad for everybody as a whole and especially bad for the members of this list if MandrakeSoft hit a wall. I think it's time for anybody that cares to become active in their support of MandrakeSoft. Loki bit the dust recently, with some employees not having gotten a paycheck since sometime in 2000. Can anyone say loyalty? Mission Critical Linux went down, with the loss of 55 employees. The financial burden is a cross that the Linux world needs to learn how to bear; and fast; it's not too late. MandrakeSoft itself is now activating it's warning lights to give everyone a heads up. The now-unemployed people loved their companies. Their dedication was plain to see. How dedicated are you when you cut back on your groceries for two years just to keep working? For free? I feel that the people of MandrakeSoft are no different with respect for the love they have both for their distribution and their company; it shines through in the product that they produce. If we want to preserve this corporate identity in our marketplace, and continue to enjoy the Mandrake releases, then I personally believe it's time for those of us that care enough to show our support for Mandrake by joining the club. At one time, Windows sold for 200 US$ a copy. For that much money, you could have a 3.3 year subscription to the Mandrake club. It's only 5$ a month; less than the cost of alot of magazine subscriptions. See: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/mdkfuture.php3 It seems Mandrake is coming into a financially rough stretch. From their announcement: Even though all of us here at MandrakeSoft are excited about the upcoming release, we've also been distracted by financial concerns. Despite continuous good reviews in the press; despite having millions of users throughout the world; despite producing an award-winning Linux distribution that is a solid competitor to both UNIX and Window$, the Mandrake Linux distribution's short-term future is in jeopardy due to a simple factor: money. _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
IIRC, he tried to expand Mandrakesoft into areas like e-learning and support, and this came at the expense of their core GNU/Linux distribution business. Since Mandrakesoft was (and still is) still a small, heavily indebted and unprofitable company, its first objective should have been to reach profitability. The moral of the story is that it's best to stick to your core strengths, and then cautiously expand only when things have stabilised. Red Hat has done that, and now they are profitable. Henri Poole was following the path of many dot coms, even though many of them had failed by that stage (the boom was over). On Wed, 13 Mar 2002 13:47:39 +0900, J. Grant [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Maybe I missed this one, what did CEO Henri Poole do that was bad for MandrakeSoft? JG I don't know one pure GNU/Linux company that can truthfully claim to be operating within their means. Even Red Hat, which is probably the most viable company right now, is still indebted to venture capitalists. Mandrakesoft has never been profitable, and past (mis)management by former CEO Henri Poole made this worse. -- Sridhar Dhanapalan The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
Well maybe, just maybe for once a company can put it's employees before it's shareholders. One of the big reasons I use linux is that it's free. Darren I don't know one pure GNU/Linux company that can truthfully claim to be operating within their means. Even Red Hat, which is probably the most viable company right now, is still indebted to venture capitalists. Mandrakesoft has never been profitable, and past (mis)management by former CEO Henri Poole made this worse. They are still on track to become profitable by the end of the year, but not without laying off some workers. They don't want to do this, hence their plea for help. Mandrake is not dying, it just doesn't want to downsize its workforce to become profitable. -- Sridhar Dhanapalan The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 2nd ed, p.25 Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [expert] Slightly OT: Supporting Mandrake
There seems to be a movement to guilt linux users into paying for linux these days since it's so good but we didn't buy it. If I wanted to pay for an OS, I would. I don't so I use linux. Linux vendors like Mandrake should not have tried to become profitable corporations by selling a product anyone can legally get for free. Darren On Wed, 2002-03-13 at 16:08, James wrote: On this note a comment if I may... I've seen a lot of talk about free as in beer. Well don't know where you come from but in my neck of the woods beer that is free today requires that I buy a round later. In my business I'm trying to Sell software management. To many of the VAR's (Value Added Resellers) I see just buy a single copy of RH or Mandrake and then install it on box after box, after box. To make matters worse they expect RH and Mandrake to support it. Partially this is in my opinion the distro's own fault, because in the past they have supported it. I've bought every box set since 7.0 and one per box I install it on. Why because I don't expect MD or anyone else to support software that I didn't buy. From my view Mandrake needs the following. 1. DON'T even think about supporting users who don't buy the copy. Free support in the e-mail groups ok... but if they call sell em a support contract. 2. Improve the ability to upgrade a running system. I've got several 7.1 and 7,2 systems that I'd love to upgrade but can't afford the time to rebuild them after a wipe and install. Data gets in the way. (One box has over 5 gigs of Twiki pages alone.) This costs Mandrake money because I'm not buying box sets, but rather upgrading manually a piece at a time. 3. CO-OP advertising. SuSe RH and Mandrake are all in a bit of a bind. Why not pool the funds so to speak and do Linux adds... Scene opens a guy asleep in bed. Words appear on the screen. This is your IT dept at 1am thanks to Linux. Just my 2 cents James *** Amazon.com save 17 million last quarter by switching to Linux. why is your company still running that other OS? On 12 Mar 2002 21:13:12 -0500 Lyvim Xaphir [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 2002-03-12 at 10:55, Dave Salovesh wrote: First, my apologies to any here who may have already heard this through other channels, and I also ask your forgiveness if I've missed a thread here where this is being discussed. And lastly, I hope you don't worry that it might not be most inappropriate for a part-time Mandrake nobody and full-time NT/2000/MS-SQL/IIS admin to bring this up. Unfortunately I did not see your post, and posted an alternative story on The Register to the list. But I'm glad that others are taking note of this and taking it to heart. I too think it would be very bad for everybody as a whole and especially bad for the members of this list if MandrakeSoft hit a wall. I think it's time for anybody that cares to become active in their support of MandrakeSoft. Loki bit the dust recently, with some employees not having gotten a paycheck since sometime in 2000. Can anyone say loyalty? Mission Critical Linux went down, with the loss of 55 employees. The financial burden is a cross that the Linux world needs to learn how to bear; and fast; it's not too late. MandrakeSoft itself is now activating it's warning lights to give everyone a heads up. The now-unemployed people loved their companies. Their dedication was plain to see. How dedicated are you when you cut back on your groceries for two years just to keep working? For free? I feel that the people of MandrakeSoft are no different with respect for the love they have both for their distribution and their company; it shines through in the product that they produce. If we want to preserve this corporate identity in our marketplace, and continue to enjoy the Mandrake releases, then I personally believe it's time for those of us that care enough to show our support for Mandrake by joining the club. At one time, Windows sold for 200 US$ a copy. For that much money, you could have a 3.3 year subscription to the Mandrake club. It's only 5$ a month; less than the cost of alot of magazine subscriptions. See: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/mdkfuture.php3 It seems Mandrake is coming into a financially rough stretch. From their announcement: Even though all of us here at MandrakeSoft are excited about the upcoming release, we've also been distracted by financial concerns. Despite continuous good reviews in the press; despite having millions of users throughout the world; despite producing an award-winning Linux distribution that is a solid competitor to both UNIX and Window$, the Mandrake Linux distribution's short-term future is in jeopardy due to a simple factor: money. _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free
