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George Mitchell

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Posts posted by George Mitchell

  1. How do we know that the Mageia fork will be better than the new Russian owned Mandriva fork?

     

    The answer to this question is easy: We don't and it really doesn't matter at this point. The developers creating Mageia were either layed off by or pissed off by Mandriva. So they are pursuing the creation of Mageia. Nothing will be lost in this effort except *their* time and effort. It is really not costing us anything because they wouldn't be working for Mandriva any more anyway unless you believe in subjecting people to slave labor and forcing them to do something they don't want to do.

     

     

    How will the Mageia developers earn money? Will work on Mageia be their full time job, or just a sideline or hobby?

     

    People who believe in what they are doing will provide some support. That will be support that would not be going to Mandriva anyway since it will come from people who are pissed off with Mandriva at the moment or who simply prefer to support Mageia instead. This answer should not be hard to understand either unless you believe that people should be forced to give their money to one distro or another. In a free society, everybody gets to choose how they spend their hard earned money. Many Mandriva developers have paying jobs with OTHER employers and they develop for Mandriva on the side. It will be the same with Mageia. Whether they make it full time, or a sideline or hobby will be an individual decision for each individual developer. It is really their business and not ours.

     

     

    Seems to me the world doesn't need anymore Linux forks, but instead needs consolidation of distros so that developer's time isn't wasted reinventing things separately at each distro. Isn't there already more than enough work for the world's Linux developer's?

     

    And that idea works very well in a totalitarian society where people get told what they will do. One could say the same about any other industry. Why would it not be more efficient if their was just one company in the whole world overseeing each industry or even just one company performing all services in the world? After all, it would greatly simplify everything. But in a free society people get to make choices and start as many different companies and non-profits and associations as they like. This is what is happening with Linux except in areas where a central dictator makes all the decisions. You can have the dictator, I will prefer the free society even if it is far more inefficient and duplicative. Amazingly free societies with all their inherent inefficiencies far out produce managed economies. It has something to do with people being more productive when they are happy doing what they are doing.

  2. Hmm, we should have stuck a fork into Mandriva years ago. The main reason I use Mandriva is the drake wizards. So as far as I'm concerned, we could just as well use PCLinuxOS or Fedora and fork only the wizards. We don't really need to fork the whole distribution.

     

    Just to be more clear, when I said "I won't be leaving here", I meant "I won't be leaving the mandrivausers.org forum" NOT that "I won't be leaving Mandriva". As for whether I will be leaving Mandriva or not, that remains to be seen. At this point Mageia doesn't even exist. At this point there really is no fork *yet*. When Mageia emerges, *then* I will decide which one I will go with. - George

  3. Well, this whole Mageia forking affair got me here after ten years plus of using Mandriva and eight years on the Mandriva forum and I won't be leaving here just because Mageia is starting a forum. I suspect there is probably a unique role for each of these forums. Certainly your place here hosts a lot of useful resources that aren't likely to be replicated elsewhere. Hopefully the surrounding turmoil will continue to bring others here as well. - George

  4. I don't see any problem for Mandriva the company (in fact if anything it's on a more stable financial footing now than 6 months ago), the potential concern for us users is how will the distro change (providing it will change)?

     

    Over and over Mandriva has found new money and squandered it away. What will make this time different? New management? They've been through that before over and over as well. The most daring experiment with new management prior to this, as I recall, was Henry Poole and we all remember how that turned out. No one hopes more than I do that they finally have their act together, but just the inept way they are "handling" this transition is screaming evidence that they don't. And all of this will effect the distro going forward. There are HUGE things coming down the pike at this point. There are the new Broadcom wireless support which should be immediately integrated with draktools given the critical need for wireless support in netbooks and laptops and the growing importance of wireless in general. Is that going to happen? Next up will be btrfs which will require its own configuration infrastructure support under draktools AND install support. Is that going to happen in a timely fashion? Not to mention simply keeping up with KDE and Gnome transitions. One of my biggest fears regarding Mandriva is NOT that it would go away, but that it would become moribund with only simple kernel upgrades and a proliferation of bugs as development becomes fragmented for lack of broad developer expertise that has brought us to where we are. You can throw out a few experienced devs and survive, but rafts of them as Mandriva has been doing? At this point I have not yet upgraded to 2010.1 because of simple issues I am seeing that are not being addressed quickly. There are NO bugfixes coming down anymore, only security stuff. How can the distro thrive in this sort of environment?

  5. Welcome aboard. .)A pretty simple plan: The wages paid in Brazil are below those paid in France, thus the company believes that part of their financial problems can be solved by using "cheaper brazilian manpower" instead of "expensive european manpower". I wonder however how much the migration-costs will be, setting up new servers, offices, etc. :rolleyes: Marketing is still an unknown word for that company.

     

    Anyway, it's just another example of Mandriva not having any clue of business-strategies that can lead to success.

     

    And yes, the Draktools are better than anything else for administrative tasks IMHO.

     

    Interesting! You wouldn't have put that together from the little bit that has come out of Mandriva the company. Mandriva the company seems to be so expert at being the elephant in the China shop. They have known for how long now that Brazilian labor was cheaper than EU labor? They do seem more interested in the cost of "labor" than in the cost of "expertise". They could have been a bit more proactive and discreet as to how they handled this whole fiasco. They also could have been a lot more upfront with their employees and users as to where they are headed and why. Certainly employee costs are a large factor in maintaining profitability, but management acumen is also a huge factor and they seem to be unwilling to take any responsibility for an obvious lack of that. Right now it would seem that employees in Brazil have job security, but they had better not count on it because with this company jobs are secure only for as long as the employees are useful and today's hot business strategy will be toast tomorrow. If things don't work out going forward it will be curtains for them as well. And on top of all of this, Mandriva has benefited over the years from a robust user community that the current management seems to care less about. About the only thing that remains for them to do is to simply unplug the server on which the official forum operates. Honestly, we have been through so many of these torturous corporate reorgs only to have history repeat itself. How can anybody from employees, contributors, or users have confidence in them anymore?

  6. Well after years of hanging out on the official Mandriva forum, here I am over at the mandrivausers forum. I guess I am finally seeing the handwriting on the wall. For me the one thing that really differentiates Mandriva from all the rest (except PCLinuxOS of course) is draktools. For me draktools is huge. If I had to leave Mandriva it would probably be for SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop simply because at least it has YAST + enhanced support, although that distribution's future is not to clear now either. I have been a Mandriva Power Pack user since Linux Mandrake 6.0 circa 1999. As such I am extremely spoiled and choosy about what sort of OS I run on my systems. I have been hoping that somehow things at Mandriva would finally get sorted out, but that looks less likely to happen than ever at this point. It is just totally amazing that a company that seems to have been cursed with a death wish from the beginning has managed to package such an incredible distro. And that is certainly a tribute to the amazing Community that is so full of life that even the suicidal spirit of the walking corpse has been unable to quench it. Sadly, Mandriva the company seems bent on becoming even more poisonous. The recent chatter I am seeing suggests that they are planning on focusing their desktop efforts on Brazil. What kind of plan is that? Everything this company does seems to be a bit crazy and direction-less. Hopefully, we, the Mandriva community, can join forces with (an)other distro(s) and continue the legend that is Mandriva the distro. From day to day Mandriva the company simply seems more and more disconnected and irrelevant.

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