The Official Mandriva Blog

2007 was a challenging year during which we made major progress:

• We went through a new capital injection in the company. It was a complex and long process, but it went smoothly. In the process, we gained a new major shareholder with an important stake in the company: Occam Capital is now seriously involved and our reference shareholder. Many of our major shareholders also participated in the round.
• We acquired Linbox, a French free software publisher with excellent technology and references. We have now properly integrated the Linbox team: we created a Corporate Business Unit, which includes Linbox and the Mandriva employees working on the French corporate market. We have defined a road map for Pulse 2.0, convergence between the original Mandriva Pulse product and LRS, Linbox Rescue Server. The first installments planned in this road map have been delivered and are being deployed on customer sites. We have won several new major customers with this technology: we are for instance deploying the system for a French customer who will use it to manage 90,000 desktops, and we’re very proud of this deal.
• 2007 was the year when the first low cost computers finally made it to the market, focusing on emerging countries. The OLPC is on the verge of making a real impact on the market, the Intel Classmate made an interesting debut, and the Asus Eee is a slick and interesting machine. We put a strong focus on OEM agreements in emerging markets and saw results in countries such as Brazil, Argentina or Nigeria, through agreements with companies such as HP, Positivo, Qbex and Intel.
• We drastically changed our traditional Linux distribution business: the product line was simplified, a strong focus was put on our free products (Mandriva Linux One and Mandriva Linux Free) and on their easy download, prices were drastically reduced, Mandriva Club membership became free, we invested a lot in improving our relationship with the community and our contributors and a complete new web site was put in place. We got a globally warm response to all these changes.
• We kept our policy of investing heavily in technology: for instance, Metisse was introduced and is now a standard part of our distro, through a partnership with the University of Paris XI which keeps investing into the technology. We were a key player in putting together a Free Software technology cluster in the Paris Region, part of the “Pôle de compétitivité Systematicâ€?.
• We kept developing our network of partners: we added countries such as Turkey, South Korea, and Lithuania. We are happy to see the success met by some of our partners in Russia, Poland, South Korea and Nigeria for instance.

Our numbers for the last quarter of 2007 will show signs of improvements and will confirm the validity of our new strategy.

We will pursue these efforts in 2008:

• On the corporate side, we plan to confirm the positive results of the Pulse product by continuing to deliver on the product roadmap, by gaining new customers, and by starting to push the product internationally in Brazil and through our partner network.
• On the low cost computer market, we believe OLPC, Classmate and Asus Eee were just the precursors: in 2008, we will see more exciting machines, many of them in preparation right now. Linux will play a key role in there and we intend to be very active on this market. We will accelerate our effort, benefit from the continued growth of that market and should be able to announce in Q1 a major partnership in that space signed in 2007.
• On the community side, we will increase our openness, listen to the community, strengthen our relationship, improve and consolidate the free Club.
• We will keep investing in innovation: we expect to see new funding for cooperative project, such as, for instance, Deskolo, an R&D project focused on ecological management of large IT infrastructure.

So I look forward to a great 2008 year and I wish all our friends, customers, contributors, partners and users a very happy new year.

Kicking off the 2008 Spring development cycle in earnest, the first alpha is here. This alpha features X.org 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, KDE 4.0 RC2 (in /contrib), GNOME 2.21, kernel 2.6.24, OpenOffice.org 2.3, new NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers, PulseAudio by default and more. Despite being a first alpha, it is also in a fairly stable and reliable state, though as always, we do not suggest you use it in a production environment. It is available in Free and One editions, with i586 and x86-64 DVDs for the Free edition and an i586, KDE-based CD for the One edition. As far as testing goes, for this pre-release we are particularly interested in testing PulseAudio and hardware detection. Please report any problems with sound functionality, and any mis-detected or un-detected hardware, to Bugzilla. Of course, please also report any other problems you run into. You can also discuss the alpha in the official forums. Download locations are available on the Wiki page: it may take a few hours for the files to be copied to all mirrors, so if you do not find them on the first mirror you try, try another.

This is my second trip to Angola. I went there last year for the first IT Forum, the local annual IT event. Last year, I initiated the discussions that led to us signing our first contract with the Angolan government. We now have a team of Brazilian engineers on site doing training and consulting. I went back this year for the second IT Forum, to check on the status of our current contract and to discuss future projects.

As in most of my trips, I haven’t seen much: from the airport, to the hotel, to the conference center and back. But I could not help be impressed by gigantic traffic jams, a visible haze of pollution, roads in terrible conditions, people quietly siting on sidewalks as if in their living room, continuous lines at gas stations, lack of public transportation besides the white and blue minivans, young people everywhere, women carrying huge baskets on their head, young peddlers selling the usual stuff and the most usual (stethoscopes?) from car to car in highway traffic jams, a no left turn policy forcing you do to long and convoluted detours, huge SUVs everywhere, garbage dumps and favelas, dust covering everything and turning into mud at the first shower, Chinese workers building highways, huge strange trees (at least strange to me), large and modern new development areas, major work on sewage (“the water is flowing betterâ€? says my friend Eric), steel and glass building emerging in the middle of the city, Wifi but little Internet bandwidth behind it, a beautiful conference center, etc.

The country has a major challenge developing its infrastructure quickly enough to keep up with the growth: Angola is the fastest growing economy in Africa, with an 18% annual growth, and it’s been going at this pace for more than 5 years now thanks to oil, diamonds, and agriculture (and peace).

Part of the infrastructure development is mastering and using IT. The man behind the development and use of IT in Angola is Pedro Teta, the Vice-Minister of technology and the head of CNTI, the national center for information technology. He holds a PhD in computer and control, speaks 8 languages, is smart, hard working, fast moving, visionary with an attention to detail. He understands one of the key issue is people and training.

Most companies and people at the conference were from Angola, Brazil or Portugal. We make sense here because of our Brazilian team.

Microsoft Africa’s Chairman was there and give a speech just before mine. The main topic was open source, so I assume I was one of the reasons for his presence. He made a few strange statements which I am not sure match the official Microsoft position: according to him, because of Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC project, Africa lost four years waiting for a machine that never came. He also said that Angola is the richest nation in Africa, so it should buy expensive computers (by which I suppose he means high powered machines running Windows). And he finally explained that open source and Free Software are not the same thing (at least he got this one right).

I gave a talk on low cost computers in emerging markets. I presented the Intel Classmate and the Angolinux distribution we installed on it: as part of the program we have here, together with the local community we built Angolinux, a localized version of Mandriva. It is now getting a lot of attention and excitement and with the Classmate was one of the hot topics of the trade show. Lots of people came to the booth to get copies of the system and to play with the machines, and many wanted to see if they could buy it.

I had a formal meeting with the Prime Minister. Pedro Teta took me and a Romanian professor to meet him and present two projects: a project of academic exchanges with Romania and the Classmate PC/Angolinux project for school deployment. The meeting was very formal, with translators, pictures and interviews with the press at the end.

So, I found Angola a fascinating country, taking the right path to accelerated development, and we’re happy to participate in this process.

On another front, it seems that our position Nigeria is improving and we remain involved in the project. It is too early to give precise facts, but things are better. So it seems that the attention drawn on the situation is helping towards a positive resolution.

First KDE-Edu Meeting hosted by Mandriva, Paris

The first KDE-Edu meeting, on the 1st& 2nd December 2007, aimed at polishing educational applications for the KDE 4.0 release and to start planning KDE 4.1. Debugging, testing, exchanging ideas, shaping libraries, getting to know everyone was the main focus of the meeting.

14 Participants:

Anne-Marie Mahfouf (France) : Organiser of KDE-Edu project

Jeremy Whiting (USA) : KAnagram, KNewStuff (in kdelibs), KVTML2 with Frederik

Albert Astal Cid (Spain) : KGeography and Blinken

Frederik Gladhorn (Germany) : KVocTrain which has changed its name to Parley

Carsten Niehaus (Germany) : Kalzium

Aleix Pol (Spain): KAlgebra

Benoît Jacob (France): Eigen, use in KDE-Edu and KDE program, Kalzium

Johannes Simon (Germany) : Parley

Mauricio Piacentini (Brazil) : KTurtle

Vladimir Kuznetsov and Olena Kuznetsova (Russia) : Step

Jure Repinc (Slovenia) : Tanslation. Testing, bugs

Patrick Spendrin (Germany) : KDE-Edu on Windows

Peter Murdoch (Wales) : KPercentage

___________________________

KDE-Edu était à Paris dans les locaux de Mandriva pour la préparation de KDE 4.1
Les développeurs de KDE-Edu se réunissaient pour la première fois les 1er et 2 Décembre 2007 dans les locaux de Mandriva à Paris. L’objectif principal de cette rencontre était la finalisation des logiciels pour la sortie de KDE 4.0 et la préparation de KDE 4.1.Cette réunion a rassemblé 14 personnes dont 2 Français, un Américain, un Brésilien, des Allemands, des Russes, des Espagnols, un Slovène et un Écossais. Elle a permis aux développeurs des logiciels éducatifs de KDE de renforcer l’esprit d’équipe.

Le projet KDE-Edu a été fondé en 2001 avec l’idée de rassembler les logiciels existants dans un module KDE pour les intégrer complètement à KDE. Le module kdeedu est sorti pour la première fois avec KDE 3.0 en avril 2002.

La réunion a permis de corriger de nombreux bugs pour la sortie de KDE-Edu dans KDE 4. Les développeurs ont aussi étudié l’utilisation des bibliothèques communes comme Eigen2, une bibliothèque de mathématiques. Son développeur a étudié avec les personnes intéressées les besoins non couverts actuellement par cette bibliothèque.

Divers sous-groupes se sont formés au cours du week-end afin de définir le travail des prochains mois. Les logiciels KDE-Edu sur la plate-forme Windows ont également été présentés. Une telle réunion redonne une nouvelle motivation aux développeurs et permet un travail intensif pendant deux jours.

So many of you wondered if it was coming, glad to be able to give the happy news - we released the new 2008-based Flash today. This version is based on shiny new 2008, is $10 / 10€ cheaper than the old Flash, and has some cool new features - I haven’t got one to play with yet, but I really like the idea of being able to plug the Flash into a Windows system and run Thunderbird and Firefox from the Flash, with all your bookmarks and emails from the Linux boot. It’s available now from the Mandriva Store.

Dear Steve,

Hi, this is François, from Mandriva.

I’m sure we are way too small for you to have heard of us. You know, we are one of these Linux company who is working hard to make its place in the market. We publish a Linux Distro, called Mandriva Linux. Mandriva Linux 2008, our last edition, has a pretty good review and we’re proud of it. You should try it, I’m sure you’d like it. We also happen to be one of the Linux companies that did not sign an agreement with your company (nobody’s perfect).

We recently closed a deal with the Nigerian Government. Maybe you heard about it, Steve. They were looking for an affordable hardware+software solution for their schools. The initial batch was 17,000 machines. We had a good deal to respond to their need: the Classmate PC from Intel, with a customized Mandriva Linux solution. We presented the solution to the local government, they liked the machine, they liked our system, they liked what we offered them, especially the fact that it was open, and that we could customize it for their country and so on.

Then, your people get in the game and the deal got more competitive. I would not say it got dirty, but someone could have said that. Your team fought and fought again the deal, but still the customer was happy with the CMPC and Mandriva.

We actually closed the deal, we took the order, we qualified the software, we got the machine shipped. To conclude, we did our job. And, the machine are being delivered right now.

Now, we hear a different story from the customer : “we shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.�

Wow! I’m impressed, Steve! What have you done to these guys to make them change their mind like this? It’s quite clear to me, and it will be to everyone. How do you call what you just did Steve? There is various names for it, I’m sure you know them.

Of course, I will keep fighting this one and the next one, and the next one. You have the money, the power, and maybe we have a different sense of ethics you and I, but I still believe that hard work, good technology and ethics can win too.

cheers

François

PS: a message to our friends in Nigeria: it’s still time to do the right thing and make the right choice, you will get lots of support for it and excellent services!

Et maintenant, pour les francophones (traduction par Caroline) :

Cher Steve,

Je me présente : François de Mandriva.

Je pense que nous sommes beaucoup trop petit pour que vous ayez, un jour, entendu parler de nous. Souvenez-vous, nous sommes une de ces sociétés Linux qui travaillent dur pour se faire une place sur le marché. Nous éditons une distribution Linux, appelée Mandriva Linux. Mandriva Linux 2008, notre dernière édition, a d’assez bonnes critiques et nous en sommes fiers. Vous devriez l’essayer, je suis sûr que vous l’adoreriez. Nous sommes aussi l’une des sociétés Linux qui n’a pas signé d’accord avec votre compagnie (personne n’est parfait).

Nous avons récemment conclu un marché avec le gouvernement Nigérian. Peut-être en avez-vous entendu parler ? Ils recherchaient une solution logicielle et matérielle abordable pour leurs écoles. La commande initiale était de 17,000 machines. Nous avions une bonne offre qui nous permettait de répondre à leur besoin : le Classmate PC d’INTEL, fourni avec une version adaptée de la solution Mandriva Linux. Nous avions présenté la solution au gouvernement local, ils ont aimé la machine, ils ont aimé notre système, ils ont aimé ce que nous leurs offrions, spécialement l’aspect ouvert et le fait que nous pouvions l’adapter aux besoins de leur pays et même plus.

Puis, votre équipe s’est jointe à la partie et le marché devint plus compétitif. Je ne peux faire de commentaires sur ce point mais certains pourront le faire. Votre équipe s’est battue et se battra encore, mais le client était satisfait du Classmate PC et de Mandriva.
Nous avons conclu le marché, nous avons compris la demande, nous avons qualifié le système et nous l’avons intégré à la machine. Pour conclure, nous avons fait notre travail. Et la machine est désormais livrable.

Maintenant, nous entendons différentes histoires de notre client : “nous allons payer pour les logiciels Mandriva comme prévu dans nos accords, mais ce dernier sera remplacé par Windows.”

Je suis impressionné, Steve ! Qu’avez-vous fait à ces personnes pour les faire changer d’avis ? C’est clair pour moi, et ça le sera pour tous. Comment appelez-vous ce que vous venez de faire ? Il y a plusieurs noms pour cela, je suis sûr que vous les connaissez bien.

Bien entendu, je continuerai à me battre cette fois et la prochaine et encore la prochaine. Vous avez l’argent, le pouvoir et peut être avons nous des définitions différentes de l’éthique. Je reste persuadé que le travail, les bonnes technologies et l’ethique peuvent aussi gagner.

Cordialement,

François

PS: message à nos amis du Nigéria : il n’est pas trop tard pour faire le bon choix, vous aurez beaucoup de soutien pour cela et des services excellents !

Mandriva today announced that the Nigerian government has selected Intel-powered classmate PCs running on Mandriva Linux for educational use in nationwide pilot in Nigeria. Mandriva is working with Intel Corporation and Technology Support Center Ltd. to provide 17,000 Intel-powered classmate PCs. The aim of this project is to improve the quality of technology delivered to students, and to help teachers and parents.

La première réunion plénière du Groupe Thématique Logiciel Libre du Pôle de Compétitivité Systematic (c’est un peu long comme formule, il faudra trouver plus court) s’est très bien passée.

Cela se déroulait dans les locaux du CNAM, dans un immense amphi sonore. Une bonne centaine de participants, universitaires, industriels et associations, sont restés du début à la fin, attentifs et intervenants.

L’équipe de Systematic avait pris en charge l’organisation et tout s’est déroulé impeccablement.

• Une première partie de présentations : description du pôle Systematic par Dominique Vernay, président du pôle, présentation du groupe thématique par Roberto Di Cosmo (président du groupe thématique), puis explications sur l’appel à projet de novembre 2007 par François Cuny.
• Ensuite une deuxième séance avec deux sessions parallèles, l’une sur la technologie, l’autre sur les systèmes d’information (des définitions assez vagues pour permettre de répartir tout le monde). Dans chaque session des présentation très brèves (5 minutes) sur des propositions de projet avec appels à compétences complémentaires et à partenaire, suivies de questions/réponses. C’était plutôt riche en contenu, avec des idées originales et une ambiance de type “speed dating”.

J’ai suivi la session systême d’information où Arnaud Laprévote présentait deux projets pour Mandriva. Ont aussi parlé (liste non exhaustive) : Pascal Rawsin de Ieurop, Jean-Noel de Galzain de Wallix, Stéfane Fermigier de Nuxeo, et Jean Paul Smets de Nexedi. Cela s’est terminé un peu trop rapidement (la salle était prise) et on n’a pas eu le temps de débriefer sérieusement.

De la vingtaine de projets esquissés, je pense qu’une dizaine devrait émerger et faire des candidats sérieux pour l’appel d’offre.

Nous sommes ensuite parti Roberto, Dominique Vernay et Laurent Kott de l’INRIA avec l’équipe “comm’” du pôle, participer à une conférence de presse, plutôt bien fournie en journalistes. Roberto était très en forme et s’est manifestement beaucoup amusé à expliquer le logiciel libre aux journalistes.

Pour les gens intéressés qui n’ont pas pu participer, il n’est pas trop tard pour prendre le train de cet appel d’offre, mais il démarre.