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.

We’re proud to announce that Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site, and on the network of public mirror servers.

The result of six months of heavy development and testing, 2008 includes all the latest software and many enhancements over previous Mandriva Linux releases. You will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, a solid kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, cutting-edge 3D-accelerated desktop courtesy of Compiz Fusion 0.5.2, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6, and everything else you’ve come to expect from the latest Mandriva Linux release. We have integrated a reworked hardware detection sub-system, with support for a lot of new devices (particularly graphics cards, sound cards and wireless chips). Also, the addition of new features and ongoing improvements to the renowned Mandriva tools continues, including a wizard to import Windows documents and settings, the new network configuration center, and improvements to the Mandriva software management tools.

You can read about the most exciting new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 in depth in the Release Tour. The Release Notes contain important information on changes from previous releases. The Errata will contain information on any future known issues and solutions for them.

Mandriva Linux 2008 was developed by the Mandriva development community, based around the Cooker development distribution. This open, community-driven development system has been in place since 1998, making it one of the longest-standing open source development communities around. The involvement of the Mandriva development community helps us to make Mandriva Linux one of the largest, most up-to-date, integrated, internationalized and standardized distributions available, for which we thank our contributors greatly. We’re proud of the standardization efforts included in Mandriva Linux 2008, including support for the Freedesktop.org XDG menu, user directories and icon theme specifications.

Mandriva Linux 2008 is available for download free of charge at the Mandriva website. The One installation CD is the recommended download with everything you need to start using Mandriva Linux 2008: it comes with a full KDE desktop and application suite, NVIDIA and ATI proprietary video card drivers, Intel wireless firmware, Adobe Flash and Sun Java browser plugins, all included.

Enjoy your brand new Mandriva Linux 2008 system!

« The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco ». It seams that we should be able to reuse Mark Twain’s joke with Paris instead of SFO. I do not remember seeing such bad weather in the summer: it’s been cold, rainy and miserable. And we know many other parts of globe are suffering from horrible weather conditions: heat wave in the south, floods in the North, not to mention hurricanes.

At the same time, the Mandriva weather has been a little rough over the past quarters, which might have added to the general mood.

So it will soon be time to cheer you up with some good news. We have been kind of quiet recently, which does not mean we have not been active. We have been working hard on our products and services offering and on our sales. On the product side, we listened to all our friends and contributors and to the community. On the sales side, our sales team was on the offensive.

We are not ready to show all the results yet, but most projects are in the works and some sales were closed. So let me give you a preview of some of the things we are planning to announce in the coming months:

1. a brand new web site,
2. a major restructuring of our consumer product line and of our club offering,
3. a nice small hardware deal in an emerging market country with our friends from Santa Clara and against our friends from Redmond,
4. a sizable software and services deal in another emerging country,
5. a strategic deal with a major player than could have a strong impact on our desktop sales worldwide.

These will not change the situation immediately from stormy weather to bright sunshine, but it will improve it and will be an indication that we are on the right path.

So, stay tuned and we’ll bring you some of those good news fairly soon.

Je note des plaintes régulières sur la langue utilisée dans ce blog : essentiellement des plaintes de lecteurs français (ou francophones ?) qui se désolent du fait que je communique en anglais.

Donc un mot d’explication : Mandriva est une société internationale, basée en France, qui diffuse ses produits dans plus de 150 pays. Donc la communication doit prendre en compte la dimension internationale de la société. Autant que faire se peut, nous communiquons en plusieurs langues : nos sites Web sont multilingues, nos produits sont multilingues et nos communiqués de presse sont traduits en plusieurs langues. Tout n’est pas toujours parfait, je le concède, mais nous faisons un effort réel.

Pour ce qui est du blog, il s’agit d’une communication plus personnelle et plus spontanée, je ne peux pas me lancer dans une traduction systématique. J’ai donc choisi d’écrire en français pour les sujets concernant plus particulièrement la France et en anglais pour les sujets de portée plus générale. Par exemple, le sujet sur Paris Capitale du Libre, sujet franco-français s’il en fut, était écrit en français et le sujet sur Microsoft qui a clairement une portée globale a été rédigé en anglais.

Je prie les lecteurs francophones de m’excuser de ne pas pouvoir faire plus pour le moment.

 

Novell, Xandros and Linspire have signed well publicized agreements with Microsoft.

Rumors on the Web have hinted that we might be next on the list. So we would like to clarify our position.

At Mandriva, we believe working in heterogeneous environments is essential to our customers. So, interoperability between the Windows and Linux world is important and must be dealt with, and anything that helps this interoperability is a good thing.

We also believe the best way to deal with interoperability is open standards, such as ODF which we support strongly and we are ready to cooperate with everyone on these topics.

As far as IP is concerned, we are, to say the least, not great fans of software patents and of the current patent system, which we consider as counter productive for the industry as a whole.

We also believe what we see, and up to now, there has been absolutely no hard evidence from any of the FUD propagators that Linux and open source applications are in breach of any patents. So we think that, as in any democracy, people are innocent unless proven guilty and we can continue working in good faith.

So we don’t believe it is necessary for us to get protection from Microsoft to do our job or to pay protection money to anyone.

We plan to keep developing and distributing innovative and exciting products and making them available to the largest number in the true spirit of open source.

François Bancilhon

I am often asked about the Mandriva business model. So here is a quick summary of the key points:

1. we’re open source
2. we’re a product company
3. we’re publicly traded
4. we address both the consumer market and the corporate market
5. we address the consumer market through multiple channels
6. we have a network of partner/distributors
7. we address the corporate market through direct sales
8. we are international

Being open source means:

• Every software product we develop and distribute is under GPL (including Pulse for instance).
• We receive contributions and we deeply appreciate the help of all of those who help us develop the distro.
• We provide two free (as in free beer) versions of Mandriva Linux together with their free maintenance: Mandriva Free, which does not include any proprietary components, and Mandriva One, which includes some proprietary drivers. These ship at the same time as the commercial versions of the product and are available for download from public mirrors.

We devote an important part of our expenses (about 30%) to the development of products. These include Linux distributions and tools to manage them. We also invest in advanced r&d projects to develop technology, some of which is integrated in our products.

We are listed on the Euronext Marché Libre. This means we publish quarterly results and we have to follow the rules and regulations from the AMF (French equivalent of the SEC).

We address both the consumer market and the corporate market. Today, we do roughly 55% of our revenue in corporate and 45% in consumer. We believe this double focus makes sense because there are both marketing and engineering synergies between those two segments.

• Marketing, because our image in the consumer world helps us when we address a corporate customer.
• Engineering, because the core of the product is common to both consumer and corporate products.

This does not mean that one funds the other: we believe each business should be profitable by itself.

We address the consumer market through three channels (in order of importance)

1. e-commerce channel includes our web store, Mandriva Store, which sells essentially boxes and downloads, and the Mandriva Club which operates by subscriptions
2. OEM agreements are established with hardware vendors such as HP or Positivo who ship and sell PCs with Mandriva pre-loaded in various geographies
3. Retail stores resell our boxes

Our consumer products are Mandriva Free, One, Discovery, Powerpack, Powerpack+ and Flash. As a service, we provide web support through our MandrivaExpert platform.

Our network of franchisees has about 25 members. Some of them have been with us for quite a while (such as our Czech and Polish friends), but we have recently grown this network aggressively. These distributors execute a strategy adapted to their local situation: they customize products, chose specific channels, and provide associated services.

We address the corporate market through direct sales and in partnership with service companies. Our key products are Corporate Server, Corporate Desktop and Pulse, our tele-distribution tool. Our services are consulting, support, maintenance and training, and we have teams dedicated to each one of these tasks. Work for a large organization typically consists in customizing a distro, helping the customer deploy it, providing tools to manage it and maintaining it and supporting it over time.

We operate worldwide: our consumer business spans 150 countries, our corporate business is more focused on France and Brazil, with some activities in other countries such as the US.

We keep questioning that model. It has evolved over time as we’ve questionned it and we’ve listened to suggestions. It will keep evolving. Except for our core value of being an open source product company.

Warly is leaving Mandriva.

I can talk freely about him, since he’s leaving.

We have a few things in common: we went through the same school and we both spent some time at INRIA. We have a few differences: like we don’t have exactly the same age, nor do we dress the same way.
He was one of those who helped me when I joined Mandrakesoft. At that time I had no clue about open source (I’m still learning, but I know a little more now), he taught me a number of things I know about the open source space, about the community and about Linux technology and about building a distro.
I think he accomplished a tremendous job for the company and the product. He was clearly a major contributor to the many versions of our product, and he should get credit for the success of our distros over the years. He is smart, and friendly and funny.
I read his departure note, his mea culpa is vastly exagerated, only those who do nothing make no mistakes. Clearly, too much depending on him, but this happens often to people ready to help and dedicated to their work.

I really loved his blunders on the Web: he could go out and express his feelings to the entire world, not taking into account corporate communication rules or needs. Even though it did put us in hot water here and there and I got upset about it, I could not help laugh about it and recognize that this is part of life — let not this be a hint or an excuse to others I will still get upset –
I will miss him thoroughly and so will many people at Mandriva. Still, I understand he would want to leave and move to something else after all this time.

For 6 years, he has been the Build Manager at Mandrakesoft/Mandriva. When he told us of his intention to leave, he was kind enough to agree to stay the necessary amount of time for us to organize his replacement. David Barth worked on that with him and I’m sure after a few hickups we’ll be fine.

So long, Warly, stay in touch and keep helping us!

Mona, or Máni, God of the Moon, has been unleashed by Warly and the team. On the race to Mandriva Linux 2007, it’s the first release candidate. Miam.

Now that Tyr was put to sleep, there have been some changes:

• New Ia Ora Theme also available under KDE
• New backgrounds integrated
• The network module b44 should be fixed
• The default web page for the web browser should display correctly

Yes yes yes, new backgrounds.

As usual, read out the known issues, and once you’ve downloaded Mona and got it up and running, feed any nasty bug you find to Bugzilla.

Even though this is neither a beauty nor hair contest, everyone go grab a mirror !