A call for recomendations and helpful some advice

Bill Mullen moon at lunarhub.com
Wed Mar 26 05:55:07 EST 2003


On Tue, 2003-03-25 at 21:05, Derek D. Martin wrote:
> At some point hitherto, Cole Tuininga hath spake thusly:
> > I've never tried Mandrake as a server - how does it compare to RH or
> > Debian?  I have to say that the biggest thing keeping me on Debian for
> > servers (and some of my personal desktop systems) is apt.
> 
> My biggest reservation about running Mandrake is that I hard the
> company isn't doing very well; it may soon disappear altogether (along
> with support for it)...

While it is true that the company is currently under the protection of
the French bankruptcy court as it reorganizes (because the now-departed
management made a litany of poor financial decisions, which left the
outfit in considerable debt), the folks that work there who also post to
the "Mandrake Expert" mailing list - such as Vincent Danen, who is the
lead guy in charge of all security updates - seem to be confident that
the current leadership have implemented sufficient changes, such as the
new EOL policy (not unlike RedHat's, except that updates remain free)
and the voluntary Mandrake Club, to enable the company both to satisfy
the court's requirements and to eventually right their financial ship.

Since the base distro itself is entirely GPLed, *including* Mandrake's
various config tools, it is entirely likely (if not downright probable)
that if, for whatever reason, the current company fails to survive, the
prime movers behind it and/or others from the (quite loyal) user base
will soon find a way to resurrect it in some fashion, IMHO.

-- 
Bill Mullen   moon at lunarhub.com   MA, USA   RLU #270075   MDK 8.1 & 9.0
"Giving money and power to the government is like giving whiskey and
car keys to teenage boys."  - P.J. O'Rourke




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