News came that a few days ago Mandriva SA, the French company that produced open source software for many years including the Mandriva Linux distribution, was put into liquidation. Created as MandrakeSoft, the company was among the pioneers of the use of Linux on the desktop but in recent years abandoned it to try to survive by selling other products.
MandrakeSoft was created in 1998, founded by Gaël Duval and Jacques Le Marois. Initially, its Linux distribution was essentially a Red Hat with the addition of useful elements for its use on the desktop. The use of an automated installation and configuration system and graphical utilities got the Mandrake distribution hostility from the traditionalist Linux users and interest from those interested in using this operating system on the desktop.
For some years, the Mandrake distribution spread considerably, also taking advantage of the general growth of Linux. In 2004 it was sued by the owner of the rights of Mandrake the magician and lost the lawsuit. In 2005 MandrakeSoft acquired Conectiva and changed its name to Mandriva, a mix between the two names.
The Mandriva distribution was good but in the Linux field selling a product can be complicated. The consequence was that in the following years for the company some financial problems started that led to some issues in the distribution of its products. In short, a vicious circle.
In 2010 a group of former Mandriva developers created a fork of the distribution called Mageia. In 2012 Mandriva faced bankruptcy but got saved. At that point, however, the development of the Linux distribution was stopped and the company focused on other products. The company donated the distribution to the community and thus OpenMandriva was created as well.
Now the end arrived for Mandriva. Although it’s been some time since the company abandoned the development of its Linux distribution, the news saddens me. In the past decade I used for some years various versions of Mandrake and Mandriva Linux and they were always good products.
A few years ago I moved on to other distributions due to the company’s problems, which gave no guarantees of reliability anymore. However, both OpenMandriva and Mageia seem popular within the Linux community and this shows that the legacy of MandrakeSoft / Mandriva will live on.
