On Tue, 2002-08-13 at 16:38, civileme wrote: > Well, as much as I may have helped the company, in producing product the > essential folks are Guillaume Cottenceau, Warly, Damien Krotkine, Pixel, > David Baudens, Fred Lepied, Juan Quintela, Francois Pons, Fred Krozat, > Daouda Lo and a few others. I agree with their evaluation as to who > could be supported. > > And I am not exactly gone. I'll be on list and I will be volunteering > some time to MandrakeExpert every week. As for defending Mandrakesoft, > as long as they continue to carry the banner of free software, I won't > have any problem with that. This is kind of an emergency measure on > their part to keep enough cash to allow the direct sales of PCs and > other items to kick in additional revenue--run out of cash and the doors > close forever... Jacques Le Marois committed to hiring all the layoffs > back when the situation bears fruit.
Well....I for one targeted you as a primary cornerstone of the Mandrake support foundation shortly after I joined the list. I was very disappointed some time back to learn that you were leaving the Mandrake team. I still hope that your future options/plans include returning to Mandrake, when the financial time is right, because if anyone in the world deserves to make money for their technical expertise and to be rewarded for their positive politico-ethical positions it is certainly you. The value of the help you have provided to Mandrake enthusiasts on this list cannot be easily estimated; however I believe it has had immediate and lasting effects which will make waves far into the future. I sincerely hope that Mandrakesoft has not underestimated your value to the list population, and to their distro in general. In any case, if Jacques does indeed plan on hiring layoffs back and it is indeed a financial problem, then I think some activism on the part of the list folks here to recruit more Mandrakeclub members is a good idea. For myself I have plans to start a local LUG and pump Mandrake for all it's worth. I also plan on pointing whoever decides (rightly so) that Mandrake is the best thing since sliced ham to the a Mandrake club subscription; thus fortifying the Mandrakeclub with new subscribers. I've already got a neighbor that's going to sign up in the next month or so, and he's started making trips to Best Buy and telling peeps about Mandrake in the computer aisles. ;) So my current suggestion to anyone who has bothered to read this far is to perhaps consider becoming activist with regard to Mandrake (if you havent already), each in his/her own way, but with financial concerns being paramount in your mind. I believe that getting peeps to order the Mandrake distro from the Mandrake site and also getting interested peeps subscribed to the Mandrake club are real good starters. You might think that you are as one person ineffective, but I'd like to suggest that everyone has "six degrees of seperation." With that effect you theoretically are connected to everyone in the world. What you say to other people concerning the Mandrake distro WILL have an effect; I found this out myself in the real world when my neighbor started evangelizing Mandrake at Best Buy; now I've got peeps calling to ask if I can help with LM82 installs. The big idea being, of course, that sometime in the near future, due to "population power," Mandrakesoft can get it's layoffs back into employ. > I am more concerned with the folks who want to make mandrakesoft a > company like SuSE. SuSE would be history except that IBM and Intel > bailed them out last year for like $45 million. Yet the same folks on > the list want Mandrakesoft to shift to a SuSE model? Horsefeathers and > Applesauce! United Linux is three companies who cannot make it because > their restrictive policies hurt them and one which is(was?) a free > software company--the fact is the big sellers now are the ones that are > basically free software--RH and Mandrake. That is the market and no > amount of business philosophy is going to alter market realities nor is > it going to alter the true assets of a free software company which does > not reside in intellectual property. > > Let us suppose that someone decides to close up the source and make the > copyright proprietary -- then the PREVIOUS release has GPL stuff people > can develop in another direction... How long do you think it would take > for someone else to do to Mandrake what Mandrake did to RedHat? I can > practically guarantee it would be less than a month. > > Civileme You know, that's exactly why I have downloaded the complete set of SRPM's with every distro I've ever had. See you soon.. LX
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