Mandrake serious problems?
Yesterday, our management at MandrakeSoft decided
to publish information about our short-term money problems,
asking that our users possibly subscribe to our on-line
Club membership. I still remain shocked about the behaviour
of the older management, who spent large amounts of money to
build what they thought need to be a successful dotcom/linux
company, and now we're in deep trouble about money.
I seriously hope a company like Mandrake, who publish 100%
of its code under the GPL license, can survive. The problem
is that we need money to pay our salaries, whereas our product
is freely downloadable.
And what surprises me, is that the
most generous people are not french or european people, but
american, whom I thought would say "walk or die, this is the
american spirit anyway". The true situation is that american
are much more generous when it comes to supporting things
they like, even if they're not obliged to pay money. In
french/european mentality, most of the times it's "I'm not
obliged to pay, you've had a bad management, this is your
problem, you may die I don't care".
Let's hope MandrakeSoft can survive this money crisis. I
think we're a great accelerator of Linux acceptation in the
public. We'll see!