Some movement @ Mandriva

[dedanna1029]

Now everyone's gonna run 'round here putting everything in spoilers!

[viking60]

[dedanna1029]

[dedanna1029]

Just thought I'd share a bit of my own history here with Mandriva (good history).

I was just doing some cleaning out of one of my email addresses, and found the oldest email I have from Mandriva - and I renewed at the time, according to my financial records. It was not a new subscription - that had come long previously to this. This is how long I was a paid subscriber, before this email (note the date). I do not remember how long it was before that, that I started paying, but according to some of the fragments of financial records I have left, it was possibly back to 2003:

from Mandrakesoft Team <[email protected]>
to [email protected]
date Thu, May 12, 2005 at 4:38 PM
subject Flash: New! Mandriva Club Silver memberships for only US$12 / 11 EUR!
mailed-by mandriva.org
hide details 5/12/05
Flash Newsletter: New! Mandriva Club Silver memberships for only US$12 / 11 EUR!

Our customers (and our potential customers) have been asking for
a long time, and now it's here - monthly payment is now available for
new Mandriva Club memberships!

Today you can subscribe to the Mandriva Club using monthly payment and
get all the special benefits restricted to Club members, starting at
US$12 / 11 EUR!

- Privileged access to all commercial Mandriva Linux versions, including
the contents of the boxed releases, and special Club releases
- Access to all commercial applications
- Exclusive discounts on Mandriva Store (up to 25%!)
- Access to the Mandriva Club Chat room which features the
Mandriva team and some special events (the most recent was with Gael
Duval, Mandriva Linux creator!)
- Access to our simplified updates system, Mandrivaonline
- Forums and articles restricted to Club members
... and much more

And as if that weren't enough, the new, redesigned Mandriva Club
site is coming soon!

With the monthly payment there is no need to go through a complicated
renewal process when your subscription expires, payment will be
made automatically every month.

Prices:
Silver Member - only US$12 / 11 EUR per month
Gold Member - only US$60 / 55 EUR per month
Platinum Member - only US$120 / 110 EUR per month

Join the Club and download right now for only US$12 / 11 EUR!
http://www1.mandrivalinux.com/en/club/

If your application is sponsored by an existing member, he will
brewarded with free months of membership.

Existing Club members will be able to renew their subscription
by monthly payment or convert from annual to monthly payments soon.

Mandriva Club Team.

------------------------------------------------------------------
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I wish I had the original email where I first started as a paid subscriber. I started with Mandrake 9.1 initially, but didn't pay at first. It was some time after that.

[viking60]

Yes that is almost a piece of ancient history there. You have been using Linux for quite some time.

[dedanna1029]

sure have.

[viking60]

I never was all that happy with Mandrivas decision to only support KDE. But then again it should not be rocket science to just install a working Gnome.
This Bug report makes me a bit uncertain though.
https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=60845

[dedanna1029]

I have already reported this to the GNOME devs:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627816

That in itself is wrong. I've gotten the same in Mandriva before (a good while back), and it's never happened in any other distro that I've run. I never got it in Arch, I never got it in Fedora. It's got to be a Mandriva bug; maybe a bit of regression there?

How can the community support Gnome by themselves, without at least one MDV maintainer who volunteers to help? The community doesn't know where MDV left off with anything; they need at least some kind of guidance from someone at MDV, even if that person has to volunteer free time.

At the same time, if they stated that they do not support Gnome (and they did this in plenty of time to notify people), then they don't support it, which would make the bug invalid, sadly. I can understand why at this time they don't; they are coming up from a hard financial fall, and right off the bat, they need to take things slow and easy. Maybe once they can stabilize again, they can move on with Gnome and other DEs.

However,,,

As you can see the bug was reported upstream to the gnome devs. I don't know of
anything else that could be done now.

... From Gotz once again, is not helpful. It is not a Gnome issue. It is an MDV issue, and someone needs to pick up the ball and run with it, or invalidate the bug.

[dedanna1029]

Look on the right, under "Supported by" here.

[rolf]

ISTR seeing Sebastian Trueg's name associated with the Mandrake|iva company for quite a while. More recently, Sebastian Trueg of Mandriva takes home aKademy Award

OpenSource

The company is fully committed to Free and Open Source Software. Part of its commitment, it develops, maintains and distributes two free-of-charge distributions: Mandriva One, a light, easy to use, live-and-install distro and Mandriva Free a pure GPL distro, it contributes to major open source projects such as Gnome and KDE and it puts under GPL all the software it develops and distributes.

Over the years, probably varying according to financial realities, the company has always made good on its commitment to FOSS by putting money where its mouth is, a fact that does not seem to get widely appreciated.

[viking60]

How ever little money that might be, it is hereby appreciated The financial situation might have been better if they had prostituted themselves for Microsoft.
They never did, and that is a big

[rolf]

There is, I think, a little behind-the-scenes glimpse from Eugeni Dodonov's post of a link to the cooker ML, translated here.
At least, I have not seen this type of evidence before today.