Mandriva falls on bad days - again

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 02 December 2008 02:55

Opinion and Analysis

The global economic crisis is taking its toll on many technology companies and Mandriva, the Linux company based in France, has now taken a hit.
Last week, the company announced that it would be terminating the services of all its external contractors, that is those who work from remote locations.

This includes Adam Williamson, a moderator for the Mandriva community forum. Williamson, it may be recalled, figured in these columns recently, over comments he had made about Canonical, the company that is behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

Williamson, at times, has made intemperate comments about other distributions, but those apart he has been an untiring supporter of Mandriva on many English-language forums and it is difficult to see why he has been given a pink slip.

Unless, of course, Mandriva does not wish to have someone spreading the message that it is a worthy competitor to other well-known distributions.

Indeed, it seems silly that when companies trim staff, they tend to cut people who are actually contributors to the core product that keeps them in business.

Mandriva is no stranger to financial problems. In 2003, the company, then known as MandrakeSoft, filed for the French equivalent of Chapter 11.

It filed an application to emerge from this state in March 2004. Its exit plan aimed to pay creditors, without recapitalisation as a pre-condition, over nine years.

At that stage the company said the turnaround was largely made possible by improvements in its financial results, having recorded its first profitable quarter since 1999.

Trading was resumed on the Euronext Marché Libre and the US OTC market and new capital was raised from a subscription offering.

Among the many distributions which have an European heritage, SUSE and Mandriva were the two best known. Once SUSE fell into American hands, with its purchase by Novell in 2003, there was a gap opened for Mandriva to fill on the European continent.