The Official Mandriva Blog

Mandriva Spring right on time!

We are delivering our Spring Distro on time, i.e., on the very same day we had planned 6 months ago. Thanks to the hard work of the developers in France, Brazil and elsewhere, thanks to the help of all the contributors, without whom none of this could happen, and thanks to Anne’s – how should I put it– gentle, but very firm stewardship. It’s a great distro and we’re proud of it.

Contributions to the Kernel

The Linux foundation recently published information on who contributes to the kernel development. Out of the 30 or so companies which contribute significantly to the kernel, there are only three distribution editors: Red Hat, Novell and Mandriva (and none other). We are happy and proud to do it. And please remember, when you buy Mandriva products or services, you help us contribute to the Linux kernel.

Manbo Labs

We reached the end of our first cycle of Manbo Labs. We set up this joint development effort with our friends from Turbolinux in the Fall of 2007. It was not easy at first since we had different cultures and approaches, but we learned how to work together. The first delivery of Manbo Labs now serves as the core of our Mandriva 2008 Spring distro. Turbolinux will base its next product on the same core. We are happy we did this together, it allowed us to invest more in the core technology. As announced, the core components are all available under a free and open source license

Our recent announcement concerning the creation of a joint lab with Turbolinux has generated some controversy. Even PJ, from Groklaw, a site we like very much at Mandriva, showed some concerns and signaled her intention to stop using our Distro.

So I would like to clarify some points:

1. Signing he Manbo Labs agreement does not change anything to our policy or our commitment to Free and Open Source software and our position with respect to software patent, nor does it change anything to the statement we made about Microsoft partnerships.
2. Our position about software patents is that software should not be patented and we have supported in Europe the fight against software patents.
3. Our support for principles of open source remains what we have always stated

• • everything we develop and distribute is under GPL
  • we develop, maintain and distribute for free a pure GPL distro (Mandriva Free)
  • we develop, maintain and distribute for free a live and light distro (Mandriva One)

1. We are aware and acknowledge the Turbolinux position with respect to Microsoft, and we know that it is very different from ours. The agreement is written so that Mandriva can fully maintain its commitment to Free Open Source.
2. As for Manbo Labs:
   1. The scope of work is about 100 low level RPMs, all in GPL
   2. Product will be available for public release under GPL
   3. Development is public, made on our Cooker environment and associates the community

So we believe that, by setting up Manbo Labs, we are contributing to the development and use of Linux and Free and Open Source software.

Being a commercial Linux distribution editor is tough.

There are a few commercial Linux distribution editors in the world: Red Hat, Novell/Suse, Turbolinux, Mandriva, Ubuntu/Canonical, Linspire, Xandros, Red Flag, CS2C and Sun Wah to name the key ones.

Yes, yes, I do put Ubuntu/Canonical in the list (what a blasphemy) and will elaborate in a further post on why I do so. Of course, I do not put Debian in there, which is a true community based non commercial distribution.

To my knowledge, the only companies in that list which actually publish their financial numbers are Red Hat, Turbolinux and Mandriva.

• Red Hat is publicly traded on the Nasdaq in New York
• Turbolinux is publicly traded on the Hercules market in Tokyo
• Mandriva is publicly traded on the Euronext Marché Libre in Paris.

So for those three, we know. For the others, we guess or we accept to believe what they say (if they say something).One could make the point that Novell/Suse is also listed, but their activity in the Linux/Open Source space is within a division of a much larger company. So, they are free to define what goes in there and what does not and I will remain skeptical of their actual numbers.

Further to my knowledge, the only company making money is Red Hat.

Of course, it is possible that Novell/Suse will become profitable thanks to the bounty of $320M provided by Microsoft, but it is my conjecture, and the grapevine tells me, that without this they are not profitable.

Both Turbolinux and Mandriva have shown losses in their last financial reporting. They both cover a large part of their expenses with their revenue, but not enough to be profitable.

I understand that all the others are actually losing money. I will be happy to be proved wrong by the publication of audited results.

• As far as I know, the three Chinese players keep their cards close to their chest, but are losing money.
• The last time I had information about Linspire, it was bleeding cash.
• Not sure for Xandros, but I would guess they are losing money (unless Andy tells me differently).
• And there again, in the absence of published results and based on my understanding, I would conjecture that Ubuntu/Canonical is the winner in terms of losses, since it has virtually no revenue and hefty expenses.

Where does this leave us: everybody is losing cash, so it’s a difficult business and no one, besides Red Hat, can claim to have the solution and the ideal business model.