Mandriva or as some of us remember it Mandrake is in it’s death throes yet again, it would seem they are in financial difficulties and may have to go into liquidation. At the time of writing this post they have had a reprieve till mid February thanks to a donation by the Paris Region Economic Development Agency however their future looks decidedly dicey to say the least.
Mandriva is like the Woolworth’s of the Linux world, everyone has heard of it, everyone has visited it , a small amount of people use it, but now it’s probably past saving EVERYONE is lamenting it’s demise. ”So why are you blogging about it Pete?” I’ll tell you why, I saw a story from Slashdot on G+ that was just such utter bollocks I felt the need to vent my spleen.
Released in 1998 and based on Red Hat 5.1 (RH being non proprietary at the time) Mandrake (Mandriva) was probably ahead of it’s time in respect of trying to get people to pay for Linux by running the Mandrake Club. Basically the club, which was closed in 2009, was a paid membership, yearly fee, in bronze, silver or gold, and optional corp status. It gave you access to releases before the public. Members also got access to the Powerpack edition for free, ( 2 releases per year). Powerpack have proprietary drivers, a (legal) DVD player and the offical Adobe reader. It also gave access to dedicated update and download mirrors, meaning better performance, It also provided a closed forum and support, help desk etc. Thereby being amongst the first to offer in effect support contracts for their products.
Like most people Mandriva was always my first choice when offering a Linux distro to a new user until Ubuntu became more stable around 2006 having first hit the streets in 2004 this, from a user stand point, Ubuntu may have been one of the first nails in the Mandriva coffin. Other distributions such as Red Hat focused on the Server and enterprise customer offering business support contracts from around 2003 onwards and also have one of the largest, extensive and professionally recognised training programs within the Linux community today. Canonical, which owns Ubuntu (Or as they like to term it “Canonical is the parent company of Ubuntu.”) has only recently within the last few years started to make some headway in the Server and support market. Mandriva never sought that business model, their aim was to support their desktop user base, this was innovative in that currently pretty much all the distributions leave desktop support to the community via forums and wiki’s.
Even a cursory search will reveal some of the main reasons for Mandriva’s problems have been managerial and poor promotional ability, contrary to the post on slashdot which seems to believe the only way for a successful Linux Distribution business model is to follow Red Hat’s path, Mandriva still has the right idea as nobody is offering an affordable desktop support package. True Mandriva tried it and failed but was that their fault? Or was it just that the community, at that time, was not ready to start paying for something that they had downloaded for free? Times are changing and so is the FOSS user base, maybe there’s still hope for them. My spies tell me there are whispers of a possible Russian deal that maybe brokered at FOSDEM, I certainly hope so.
Next time your Geek friend enthuses over his system just tell them “Yeah but it cant do jack shit without you.” I came home last night and the wife said “You’re going to explode in a minute.” she was right, ParkingEye had sent us a parking ticket for, wait for it, £50.00! Oh and it goes up to £110.00 if you don’t pay within 13 days! Nice business if you can get it.
We have a new system in the city centre car park, oh it’s a lot simpler than that silly idea of ‘pay and display’ none of this put your money in get your ticket shove it on the dashboard, oh no, now you must enter your vehicle registration first on a tiny keyboard while a queue waits behind you then lift the little plastic guard and feed your cash in making sure you have the correct money as, sorry it doesn’t give change. 
So last week I called into town to meet my daughter I’m a good boy and always get a ticket, now most people would throw it away once they have left the car park and I usually do however (Fortunately) when I ran out to the car in the pitch dark last night in the door pocket was two tickets and even more pleasing there was one for the 28th Nov. Straight away I could see what had happened I had typed the last three digits in the wrong way round!
Now if a human looked at this stuff they would have gone “Doh! I see what that moron did” and before some smart arse says “But hey that wasn’t your registration was it? ParkingEye check with DVLA and get ALL your cars details before sending the fixed penalty so if the camera says it’s a Citroen and the ticket says it’s a Fiesta then there is something wrong in’t there?
“Why are you moaning?” I’ll tell you why, because it’s a PITA and will be a PITA to sort out. I emailed them last night with a scanned copy of my evidence, their phone system is like Ebay designed to stop you speaking to anyone. I’ve learnt with these automated systems to pretend you don’t have a touch phone, after waiting about three (Which is a long time I hasten to add!) minutes it finally said “I will put you through to an operative.” finally a young woman came on the line who clearly spends her days fending off irate parkers.
PITA_1 After five minutes of explaining what had happened she said “I will have to speak with your wife.” but I was the driver? “We will need your wife’s permisson to speak with you.” so I’m wasting my time then? “we will need to speak with your wife however if you emailed in you should hear within a couple of weeks.”
PITA_2 So I have to wait a couple of weeks to find out if they accept my evidence which I suspect if they don’t means they will try and claim £110 instead of £50?
PITA_3 My wife works nights ParkingEye are only open 9am-5.15pm Mon-Fri so that mean the wife has to go without sleep to speak to them.
PITA_4 The wife will have to ring them from home and give her permission for them to talk to me then ring me at work and tell me she’s done it then I will have to ring them.
And people wonder why everyone has a short fuse these days.
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