Interview with Mandriva CEO Arnaud Laprévote

[viking60]

Arnaud Laprévote Is heading Mandriva with the title of President of Management Board of Mandriva The company is now in a healthy financial position and has cleaned up it's profile. Some harsh decisions were necessary and lead to the Mageia fork. This is seen as something positive. Mandrivas profile used to be somewhat unclear and an effort to be best at "everything". The community and company will be diferenciated by the use of Mandriva.org and Mandriva.com. Mandriva has a a good market share in Brasil and a huge potential in Rusia where russian Rosalab is making a Mandriva KDE desktop. Arnaud Laprévote points out that it is fairly important for a business to make money and that Mandriva until now mainly has been loosing them. This is because Mandriva has failed to be centered on the market - the Linux market. He then explains what this market is - in general. And does not link Mandriva to much of it. He states that Mandriva has a server. And that there is the desktop market and that it still is interesting. | Man driva was focused since its origins to the Linux desktop dis tri bu tions. At the time of the cre ation, it was a good idea, it is still a good idea. Desktop dis tri bu tions are inter esting. There was a real hope, twelve years ago, fifteen years ago, till now, since the start, that Linux would be a main oper ating system for desktops. Today, now, in France, in Europe, in the US, in Africa, in most of the World it is not the case. So what is left? Brazil is the main desktop market he states and Mandriva is very sucessfull there. The strategy: So in fact, our strategy today is very simple: in developed coun tries, we are focusing on servers. Servers and pro­fes sional software. Our teams, in France, are working on a very good project which is MES. What we try to do, what we do today, is an ergo nomic server. A server which is easy to setup, easy to use, easy to maintain. A server where it is easy to setup complex software and to manage them. So that’s first thing. Second thing is that in Brazil, or in other BRIC and emerging coun tries, we are selling desktop solu tions. Obvi ously we can also sell them in developed coun tries, but the fact is that in terms of market, in term of the money we can make from that, there is more to do there than in developed coun tries, for desktop. I am sure he will fill out the "more to do in developed countries" with a somewhat clearer strategy on a later occasion. But it looks like Mandriva is heading in the right (profitable) direction.

[dedanna1029]

content deleted by poster; please delete since it won't let me

[viking60]

Fixed! man it really isn't my day today.

[rolf]

Posting from the thin client web server over ssh, using 'links' in terminal, after having installed it in an ssh-X session instance of 'ppm', the Puppy Package Manager, thanx to the "Thin Client Thread", FTW! (whew!!)

Yeah, I've used the Mandr[ake|iva] distribution since early 2000, 7.1. I've grown to appreciate the personalities that started the fork of Red Hat and those who worked very hard along the way to keep it vital and powerful. I've got to especially like RPM and the urpmi tools that Mandrake developed to extend its capabilities.

The recent changes are quite dramatic, after 11 years, but I can calculate that something like this is really necessary. Despite the ignorant nay-saying by certain unnamed career forum stickocrite moderators, I appreciate all that the new guys are doing at ROSA to make something viable, hope there is success, and that some of what I have found valuable in Mandr[ake|iva] is preserved.

[viking60]

I think it will be. Urpmi is there and I Iearned a lot from translating the wiki to Norwegian. I had to test every function to be able to document it in a sensible way. (Basically I had to understand what I was writing about).
Rosalab will probably be a giant success in Russia. And that market is huge, and definitely not under the influence of Microsoft to the same extent as western Europe.
Making money is a good start for Mandriva and we need them to make money for the sake of the distro. I am impatient so I would like to see a strategy for western Europe too and over in the Norwgian forum I constantly have to answer questions about Powerpack.
This is the first question coming from Windows:
Where can I buy Linux?
The profitable answer should be:
Here!
And it should be easy in your native language.

We always start to give the newbie a moral geek lesson where we arrogantly explain why Linux is different from Windows and that he has to refurnish his head to start using it. Then the experienced geeks start quarreling amongst themselves whether the Powepack is a good Idea or not.
While we love the sound and look of our own voice in a long and thorough discussion, the newbie went out and bought a Mac or went back to Windows or simply fell asleep.
And then there is the odd one that actually made the transition - he is now doing his best to write as much cryptic stuff as he can, to impress everybody with his newfound knowledge. Basically no one understands him; not the experienced onces and certainly not the Newbies.

The answer is simple - Keep it simple - make it easy - make it cost. I am sure it is worth quite a lot to many newbies, to avoid the above!
And if you can take it -Linux is free of course.

I think that is a market for Mandriva. If they polish the shop and especially the horrid registration exercises. It is to complicated to buy even a T-shirt there.
We need something really simple like this:

C'mon Arnaud you can do it!

[rolf]

...

True words!

Mandriva, it seems to me, has always been, largely, built on the work of unpaid contributors, characteristic of the genesis of Linux. Perhaps, the allegiance of this distro to the philosophy and spirit of FOSS, first and foremost, every step of the way, has got in the way of implementing a successful business model, which it never has. That set of priorities is a big part of what keeps me using Mandriva.