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Interview of François Bancilhon, CEO of Mandriva
#includeResource("Skel.ArticleHeader") Many news have been circulating over the web concerning Gael Duval's departure from Mandriva. Users and community members are concerned by the lay off of a key founder and would like to understand what happened and what is the impact. So let us start with the Gael situation: did you fire Gael?
Gael was not fired. This term would imply something wrong on his part, which was not the case. He was laid off.
Why was he laid off?
The company lost money in the October-December 2005 quarter. This means that we spent more money that we generated. We can do this temporarily, because we have cash in the bank, but doing this over a long period of time would permanently damage the company. So we had to make the reasonable but hard decision to cut expenses. The expenses cuts were done in a way we estimate will not keep us from generating revenue. Everyone works very hard at Mandriva and fulfills a useful task. So, when you have to cut, it means you need to cut people who were doing a good job and a useful one, so it is painful for everyone, but you have to make the hard choice.
Why is Gael suing the company?
You need to ask this to Gael. France has labor laws that give strong protection to employees and make lay offs long, expensive and complicated (but not impossible). Many employees (about 1 out of 4) sue their employer after a lay off, most of the time to get the employer to pay extra cash on top of the “regular” severance package (about 5 months for people with some seniority).
Was there a disagreement between Gael and the company management?
Not that I am aware of. We had and still have within the company and the management lively debates about the strategy and its implementation. Gael was part of some of these debates, even though he was remoted. I don't think we agreed on everything, but I never got the impression we had fundamental disagreements. I've always valued his opinion, and I still do.
Gael mentions a new project, Ulteo. Were you aware of it?
Yes indeed. Gael brought this to me about a year ago I think (I might be wrong on the date). I looked at it carefully, we discussed it for some time with Gael and Jacques Le Marois. Our joint conclusion was that it would make more sense in a separate entity, which would have a partnership with Mandriva. I started looking for someone who could help Gael on this project on the business side and found a potential candidate. Then Gael came back and said he wanted to work further on the technology before discussing this and we left it there.
Let us now turn to the company strategy: is Gael's departure a sign of a shift in strategy?
Absolutely not. We believe the current strategy is sound.
So let us try to understand that strategy better. Many users have a hard time understanding your strategy and finding their way in your product offering. Are you aware of this?
Yes, we need to make our story more readable, we have some action in process to improve that situation.
So help up clarify it: who are the target customers of Mandriva?
We have two quite different targets: individual users and organizations. For these two targets, we have different products and offering, different sales channels and different strategies. As we move forward, we will try to distinguish more the organizations taking care of both segments.
The individual users made the original target users of the company, this is what MandrakeSoft was servicing, and we have a large numbers of individual users worldwide. We are fully committed to these users and to delivering exciting technology to them. We address them through retail stores and distributors worldwide, through e-commerce, through the club and through OEM agreements with large hardware vendors such as HP, Dell, IBM or NEC and local players such as Positivo in Brazil. The products are Free Mandriva, Discovery, PowerPack and PowerPack+ and the key service is Mandriva On Line. For these users, we have recently announced Mandriva One and Mandriva Kiosk, from which we expect a lot. We are committed to our individual users. A large part of the Mandriva team is dedicated to the individual user market both in terms of engineering, services, marketing and communication.
About 3 years ago, we announced our decision to start developing a new business line for organizations (enterprises and government agencies). Thus we have put in place a new product line (Corporate Server and Corporate Desktop), we have put in place a consulting, training and support organization. We address this market essentially through our direct sales organization in France, Brazil and the US. We have announced for this market the new administration tool, Pulse and put in place our Corporate Club offer. We also offer specialized and embedded services.
Is one of these targets being developed at the expense of the other? I don't think so, I believe on the contrary that they complement each other: they have some common r&d investment in the kernel and on hardware certification. We also find often that they feed each other: some individual users have learned about Mandriva from their enterprise and in many enterprise sales situations, we are meeting some of our individual users.
Is Mandriva going away from providing a free version of its products?
There is continuous rumor that we want to depart from the open source model, that we want to charge for things that were free, that we want to drop individual customers. So let me restate what I have said many times: First, everything we develop and distribute is distributed under GPL. Second, we remain committed to provide a complete free distro (Free Mandriva and soon Mandriva One) and to make its update free.
However, and we've always been clear on this, we want to be profitable, so we need to generate revenues. We do this by providing, besides the free products some commercial products and some services that we charge for. As we provide more technology and products, we try to bring both more free stuff and more commercial stuff.
For instance, in the new Mandriva One + Kiosk offering, there is free stuff (Mandriva One) and stuff we will charge for, or make part of the Club (Kiosk). Look back at the three past years: we have never turned a free product or service into something we charge for. I'm not asking anyone to just take my word, I just say: please look at our track record.
People get the sense that some of your products are free, but that you want to charge for updates. Do you charge for updates?
We do not: for Free Mandriva, Mandriva One, Discovery, Power Pack and Power Pack+, updates are freely available and provided by us. We provide on top of this Mandriva On Line, which is a service that makes the updates easier: an icon on your desktop gives you the status (green you're up to date, red you're not), when the icon is red, you can ask for update by a simple click. We charge 20€ annually for this service. What you pay is the ease of use, not the updates.
What is Mandriva One?
Mandriva One is a Mandriva 2006-based distro, which holds on a single CD and which is both live and install. It's coming out any day now. It will first go to club members (because we like to give them an advance peek at things), then it will be free for all.
What is Mandriva Kiosk?
We have found that non technical users find it difficult sometimes to install new products and new versions of products. So the Kiosk is a response to this. The Kiosk will have a library of Bundles (a bundle is a set of RPMs that make a consistent application) and downloading and installing a bundle is done in a single click. Kiosk will be available as a paid service and will be free for Club Members silver and above.
Are you a company out to make profits?
Yes absolutely; our goal is to be profitable and growing so that we can develop great products, provide great services, and pay our employees. There is however one important difference with an ordinary company: in a standard company, you have to keep happy your customers, your employees and your shareholders. We do this at Mandriva, but we also have to keep happy our contributors, the community and our “free” users.
Version 1.61 last modified by Émilie Ngo-Van Do (admin) on 18/10/2006 at 16:45
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Comments (56)
Adieu
To me, and that's my own opinion, you don't fire (or laid-off if it sounds prettier) the founder of the company.
You need to have very good reasons and make it public, not dubious.
For me, and again this is my own opinion, Mandriva really needs to "visually" improve itself in the next 173 days ;) that it is the time I have left for my Silver fo finish.
J.
Anyway, I'm still having doubts about Mandriva ability to please both markets, corporate and SOHO, while other distros are specializing in one. Yes, I also have a grand strategic view of Mandriva ;).
Time will show…
A server is not only a corporate product, Ubuntu has a very clear orientation.
It's not only about the product itself. Not only about the bits on the CD, after all Linux is Linux. I can build a nice corporate Linux with Ubuntu and a real pretty desktop with Red Hat. I can even add the MCC to Red Hat. No, it's about all the other things, too. The revenue model, comunication, community, commercial effords, image, distance to the client. This is the real difference between distros. You are suffering it now, Adam. A lot of the nice geeks in this club are somewhat upset with Mandriva, most of this unrest is not about the product itself, but about comunication. You (Mandriva, not Adam personally) are quite often called liars in this forums. Probably changing a Developer from the corporate product to the SOHO one will not change a thing. But maybe taking two corporate salesman out of the streets, and adding a webmaster and an "Adam plus" to the forums will.
Ubuntu is just somewhat Debian, but it looks like "Linux for humans"...
But as I said, I'm just another geek with another perfect strategic view for Mandriva's world domination ;).
Let's wait and see what Francois does ;).
P.D.: A preview feature to add comments could be great ;), specially to people with a english as bad as mine.
The above nice rant is now an illegible mess.
Kind Regards,
Sitor
If you are in troubles about money, and you think that the CLUB is a good solution. IMPROVE IT!!!!.
Music?, earlier downloads?. Please no more jokes. Make business. Generate services and people will respond.
Take a look to Mac services (email, ldap, cvs, disk, etc.)
The club is more or less worthless and the firing or laying off of someone who was seen as a friendly guy and drove Mandrake in the right direction until the corporate guys took over, will do more harm to Mandriva. Personally I have stuck with this distro through loyallty but its now waning. Other distros offer better features, upgrade cycles and you don't have to pay a dime. We pay to be club members, but what do we get buggy releases, yet they are laying off engineers. I would have thought that keeping engineers and improving the quality of releases would bring in more profits. Anyway when my club membership expires, its goodbye to Mandriva from me after 7 years.
Par contre, personne ne peut critiquer entièrement Mandriva pour la logique commerciale de fonctionnement qu'ils adoptent. Il faut bien qu'ils se développent et gagnent de l'argent, tout comme RedHat.
La seule chose qui me fait penser que Mandriva a intérêt a bien gérer ce qu'elle fait si elle ne veut pas couler, c'est le manque de clarté dans leur avancée et surtout, le manque de finition de leurs offres, ou produits.
Ex : Les pb d'accès aux mirroirs du club en septembre dernier. Avec les pb de download d'OpenOffice 2.0, alors que la version officielle était disponible sur le site openoffice.org. Le fait que les utilisateurs 64bits soient lésés en termes de paquets. Le fait que la multitude de produits (Discovery, basée sur lycoris), Official, Corporate soit basée sur quelque chose de pas assez éprouvé : on voit bien qu'il faut au moins 6 à 8 mois avant que la version Official soit corrigée de ces erreurs de jeunesse (ce fut moins laborieux avec la 2006, je l'accorde). Cette fameuse discovery, totalement dénuée d'intérêt en elle-même vu la pauvreté du contenu. Pourquoi ne pas avoir généralisé le travail de lycoris à toute la gamme de produit ? Ceci entraîne une hétérogénéité aux yeux de l'acheteur qui entraîne un manque de visibilité.
De mauvais choix pour la distrib : kat, au lieu de beagle. Shorewall, au lieu de firestarter.
De bonnes idées, mais pas avec les bonnes personnes, ou alors mal fagottées : exemple : partenariat pour l'installation de la distrib sur ordi portable. Pourquoi HP, alors qu'ASUS, Dell, Sony, IBM, font vraiment de bons ordis portables reconnus par le public et le professionel. Et puis pourquoi des config aussi pourries sur ces ordinateurs HP ? Idem pour les ordis de bureau : les config ne sont pas attirantes du tout.
Je pense que tous ces choix, avec le marketing qu'il y a derrière, sont un peu embêtants.
Alors, que le but principal de la societe devrait être de fournir une Official solide, intégrant ou pas lycoris, sur laquelle baser le reste de la gamme.
Bref, j'espère que Mandriva saura corriger tout ces points noirs, qui ne sont pas des erreurs de jeunesse, mais des pb de choix, alors que la base du produit, elle, est actuellement solide. De toute manière, la concurrence ne manque pas : Ubuntu, Kubuntu, si ces distribs deviennent plus matures, et sinon, SuSE (pas testé encore, mais connue pour la robustesse de ses outils et de sa base).
Je souhaite enfin à Mandriva de nous sortir réellement une version 2007 du feu de Dieu, avec un logiciel d'indexation de contenu entièrement fonctionnel, ReiserFS4, dernier noyau, Komposé utilisant composite (on peut rêver), une GUI pour firewall aussi efficace que firestarter, Smart intégré, la visio sous Skype (???) etc...
Bon courage. P.S. je ne suis pas contre Kat, je souhaiterais juste qu'il soit aussi fonctionnel que Spotlight de MacOSX, ou Copernic Desktop Search sous Windows.
For my part there is still the benefit of doubt. But Mandriva is on the razor's edge here. And it may well have already triped over. All weighted, I have the feeling FB have only seen Gael as a financial charge and missed the point on his real usefulness.
Too bad, all this leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
But the great mistake is the reaction that will take place (is taking place already, indeed) from the User Community of Mandriva. Gaël was considered as a user of the Community. He brought Mandrake, now Mandriva, to life, the CEO admits that he's working hard and doing a great job and what's the price for that? He's laid off.
I'm afraid that this mistake will not be forgiven by the Community. Maybe that's the beginning of the end of Mandriva. I wish I am wrong, but many things must change if you want your users to recover the confidence on Mandriva as a company. And the first one should be to bring back Gaël to Mandriva again.
Regards.
Dear Mandriva, do not forget from where you come.
Living in the typical U.S. corporate world it is quite difficult to push Linux anywhere past the fringes. Yes, our external DNS runs Linux and an application or two may even require Linux, mostly Suse or Redhat. But the big segment is and will be for a long while MS Windows.
I am mostly familiar with Mandrake, and of course swear by it, and would like to see more of Mandrake, oops, Mandriva at my place of work, even when used for fringe, highly specialized functions. But, Mandriva has nearly no recognition in the corporate world.
I am even regarded as a kind of weird Linux fanatic for going for a 'non-corp- distribution' where most of my colleagues go for R & S. This is possibly a big uphill battle for Mandriva but it would be the first thing I would like to see about Mandriva.
As a corollary, I would like to see more emphasis on the server side. And by this, I would strongly imply security. Mandriva has to adopt a security framework, whether it is SELinux, GRSecurity or whatever and truly commit to it. And of course, drag the community into it.
I do not know of other members' corp. experience but in my case, security is a BIG DEAL. (Windows has left a bad taste but we are hooked on it). And no, msec is good, but not good enough.
A third request would be to have better documentation of the mandriva contributed software. For example, I find msec documentation sub-standard.
So there you have it, better enterprise image, a la R & S, more commitment to security and better documentation.
Best wishes on your new course.
But it is one more 'Against' mark on Mandriva's tally, and I will begin investigating alternatives, just in case: the 2007 edition will make it or break it for me.
Firestarter possede une interface graphique tres intuitive et permettant de configurer rapidement et tres efficacement un firewall complet. Il est de plus extrement rapide aux changements.
mais avoir une interface graphique lance en root en permanence sur son bureau est une tres tres mauvaise chose, clairement, en terme de securite. (du au serveur X, a sa gestion de la memoire vive). C est donc une tres mauvaise habitude que l on donnerai en exemple aux gens. Ensuite, detail, firestarter a une facheuse tendance a modifier des programmes tels que le client dhcp (dhcpc, pump ou dhclient) Ceci n enleve rien bien sur aux qualites du logiciel, dont j apprecie vraiment la simplicite, l efficacite et la rapidite de mise en oeuvre.
la meilleure chose serait d avoir les memes possibilites de configuration pour l appliquette de mandi. Mandi est rootless et fonctionne sur le bureau user tant que la securite du systeme lui permet. C est une approche qui me semble plus logique, en tout cas plus sure. Ce qui n enleve rien bien sur aux manques actuels de possibilite de configuration pour lui.
voila, bien informe, meilleur critique :)
I'm sure they feel this will enable them to go forward with the company, where too much management might have been slowing things down.
I just renewed my silver membership for the 3rd year, and am very satisfied. I run Mandriva on 2 pcs, and 4 servers, so I really like the flexibility upgrading and installing as often as I want, and have found the Mandriva personel to be fast and helpfull whenever I requested anything, like FTP access or something. Keep up the good work!
Like particular member I wish to find easy install/update for games to my son, office apps to me, drivers (my nvidia install need manual install to finish successfull!!) and so on.
The update engine exists, the phorum exists but anyone generete content.
Well I'm reaaly dissapointed. I am not happy and I really wonder where Mandriva will go and if is it convenient for me.
Je me demande si je ne vais pas étudier plus sérieusement Kubuntu…
moving from a two release in one year cycle to to a one release per year cycle may have been a bad idea. it might have worked better for them if they had waited and grown the company. they are now making losses again. that is unfortujnate but like i said if they cant make a go of it and be profitable and seem to draw more and more bad pr upon themselves then lets prepare for the future when driva is forked and the community takes it over.
also i want to mention that i have noticed that intel is now advertising here. hopefully mandriva will not follow other companies, for example gateway and skype to either go out of business or to damage amd.
life goes on. sometimes we all have to take a look around us and see where our favorite company is and be readyh for whatever comes.
please dont let intel get their hooks into u and tell u to mess up the distro for amd processors. if u go there it will drop u out of the game.
Its very disturbing to find out that the creator of Mandrake was laid-off or how-ever they wish to put it. What's even more creepy is that they lay-off a peson like Gael and yet there are so many things that are just not right with the way the club members are treated here.
KDE 3.5 has been out for over a month and yet not one update for this. The cooker team blind sides everyone that uses apache and deceides they are going to rename and change how they are going to promote 2.0 and end up causing me and alot of other people grief because we don't want to use that version. I like 1.33 and 2006 broke everything related to that.
Just the lack of simple updates that should be timely for club members are 6 months to a year old by the time we get it. XORG is a good example that one. Other distro's beat Mandriva on updates literally by months ahead. Yet I have stayed with Mandrake for all these years.
This turn of management against the founder has me thinking here on just what Mandriva is intending to do now.
I saw this comming a long time back when the club members were getting very old updates to almost everything.
This just didn't happen over night. Its been a on going issue for the last year and a half. Something was going to give and this was it.
Things started going bad after 10.1 was released. Look at the track record for members getting anything that was a timely update. Its gotten longer and longer for them.
There are examples for what happens here: Steve Jobs was "laid off" by a former Pepsi Cola manager and soon after Apple was slipping seriously towards oblivion. You take the soul out of a product and people will start looking elsewhere. In the end it even commercially is the false move!
Not "fired"?
Why do the ties always get the power…
Au fait puis-je me faire rembourser les quelques mois qui restent ?
Adieu
intel may offer them to do more advertising for them and then if they accept and they have to because of their financial situation then intel will later move them to a "if u make mandrive support intel processors better than amd we will help u " mode.
they should not have changed from a bi yearly release to a yearly release.
when they did this they gave up half their income. not a good move probably every but especially if u dont have billions in the bank to cover your mistakes.
its strange , as soon as they became profitable the first moves they make are to make themselves unprofitable again.
As an OpenSource company your business will come, directly or indirectly, by the community. Pls, if you not agree with this. Think twice!
From here, COMMON SENSE.
1) Add services to the Club in order to give more support from here (adding new members). One LiveCD for already Mandriva users, isn't the way!. I really do not understand wich kind of service you think you are offering us.
2) Improve the QUALITY trying to distinguish your products from the others (OpenSuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc).
Pls, do not stay like know… It seems that you are waiting the people forget what you are doing… Wake up Mandriva! We bet for you!
Mandrake and progeny were/are a Red Hat fork.
Gael ran around handing out home burnt Cd's, back in the early days… FB just tossed that kind of commitment out the window.
So now you know why Mandriva is losing money… FB does not make wise choices.
333 days left on silver, so I'll see how it goes.
But I think we'll also fork, that is the beauty of FOSS.
We can both fork, and continue to watch, even support Mandriva, while we find which we like best.
Area66.
I do not in any way have enough information to give even suggestions of the full path out of this mess, but the first step is to remove Bancilhon. Sorry sir, but your time is up.
I joined club to help Mandrake turn a corner because it was the first distro that I managed to truly use. However the acquisition of Connectiva and subsequent, more corporate way of doing things made me look elsewhere.
When my ordinary membership lapses I shan't be renewing and I have ceased recommending it to my friends.