Re: About Eazel and Mandrake

[Kevin Forge <forge@myrealbox.com>]

Microsoft has pay support for Office.  I do not know a single
individual who has used it.  By contrast lots of people use the
similar pay support for Visual *** and MS SQL.

You can however make money delivering desktop software to people.
Dell is my 1st choice as the company most likely to turn a 
profit doing this with Linux :).

In the mean time most of the actual work isn't dependent on the
state of these companies.  However I still care because they did 
good work.  Mandrake may just be tightening up it's belt or 
something.  I haven't read this link yet but Mandrake allegedly 
tells it's side.

http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-05-22-012-20-NW-MD

Jean Francois Martinez wrote:
> 
> Last week we heard of Eazel demise, today there is an unconfirmed report of
> layoffs at Mandrake.  This is bad.  It also illustrates the fact  that the
> model for financiing free software through support could work on mission
> critical applications but it is dificult (at least with current maket size)
> to make money from support when it is for desktop or private user oriented
> applications.    I hope Mandrake survives since they have done a lot for
> improving Linux usability but they will have to reorient towards servers and
> business applications.
> 
> Since there will be no commercail desktop oriented distrib and teh present
> free ones don't care then there is a need for a free desktop-oriented distrib
> .
> 
>                         JFM