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!