Journal MamasGun's Journal: Saving Mandrake by forking it: the next step.
Oh man, this has been a crappy day. Not at work, really...that's been mellow. However, today seven of nine Supreme Court Justices bent over for Disney, essentially saying "Limited Time? We don't need no steenkin' Limited Time!" And now comes the news that Mandrake has filed for the French equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The Mandrake news upsets me even more than the Supremes' ruling, which I was expecting. Certainly I was also expecting the news about Mandrake eventually, but not this fast.
I am running v.9 and was looking forward to 9.1. MDK 9 is the least troublesome distro I have ever had the pleasure to deal with. Aside from the unclean shutdown problem, which I had to deal with by yanking NFS out by the roots, it's been great. (Still gives me complaints at shutdown but it's not a bfd.) It installs easily, it's largely locked down by default, and it's very clear what you need to get rid of to make it watertight. It comes with a fine compliment of development tools, lots and lots of games, and multimedia goodies up the ying-yang.
I like Lycoris, but only as a second choice. Lycoris is just too stripped down for my tastes. I want to make decisions about which apps are "best of breed" for me, not someone else. And after this whole SCO debacle, I am nervous about running something based on Caldera. If I wanted to have licensing problems, I'd just run Windows 2000 and be done with it.
And please, don't tell me to run Red Hat. I am a KDE kind of gal, and I want to run KDE without Red Hat's "improvements." Don't tell me to run SuSE. I want to run KDE without SuSE's proprietary bullcrap. And besides, SuSE is part of UnitedLinux, which is sounding more and more ominous with each day.
If I really wanted to work like a dog to get KDE completely set up correctly, I would run KDE on top of FreeBSD, not Debian, nor the current 'leet favorite, Gentoo. I am tempted to buy Libranet now to see whether or not they have truly made Debian friendly enough for me. It is rumored they got KDE almost as right as Mandrake did, but I haven't seen Libranet run so I can't say for sure.
I have come to a fearsome conclusion. It is time to fork MDK. It is time to create a sustainable version of the distro which can outlive Mandrakesoft. It might mean pruning it judiciously to get it down to one or two
Hopefully stuff like Mandrake Control Center isn't proprietary like YaST is. That could be trouble for a GPL fork. Let's hope that's not the case.
