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LeMarois on Mandrake Club

According to Jacques Le Marois, MandrakeSoft's CEO, " More than 5600 people 
have subscribed to the Mandrake Club". And all that is needed to keep 
Mandrake afloat is some 55,000 to 89,000 Club members, ten times as many.

An easy task says Le Marois.  "If we look at the Linux Counter figures 
(http://counter.li.org), he says, Mandrake Linux represents 3.6 million 
users." (1) The problem is only 125,000 Linux users are registered at The 
Linux Counter, a significant drop since dead entries have been eliminated. 
And, of all Linux users, only 20% would be Mandrakians. Which boils down to 
25,000 users... God knows where the 3.6 million users come from!

(1) http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/club/club-answers.php3

But not all users register. If twice as many use Mandrake on a regular 
basis and that the lowest figure to keep Mandrake afloat is the most 
realistic, every dedicated Mandrake user will have to send $75 USD on 
average every year. Are advantages such as getting Star Office one month 
early worth that much?

As for resorting again to the stock exchange, it's no solution, even 
according to Le Marois. "A shareholder expects a financial return on 
investment", witty Jacques explains. In other words, the investor pays once 
and then expects a return on his investment for ever and ever amen.

What Mandrake's CEO expects is just the contrary: users paying for ever in 
exchange for a "service", hence bailing out shareholders and investors such 
as AXA, Lazard Bank, Vivendi-MCA-Universal, etc. He's inviting users to 
subsidize Jean-Marie Messier and the Bronfmen.

Though Le Marois foresees this tidal wave of petty cash rising in not such 
a distant horizon, investors aren't quite as optimistic. Mandrake shares, 
which were introduced on Euronext Marché Libre less than a year ago at a 
little more than  $6 USD, kept at around $4.50 for quite some time. They 
are now down to $1.96 .


Meanwhile back on the farm, Patrick The Man Volkerding will soon be 
releasing Slackware 8.1 . He claims he's revamped the installer and the 
package management system. Though Slack is certainly not all glitzy 
interfaces, it should work fine. It's going to offer the latest version of 
the kernel and KDE just the same.

Volkerding doesn't spend a minute thinking about bankers, investors and 
shareholders. And rightly so. Since every dollar sent goes directly into 
Slackware, quite a few people wouldn't let him down.

Tu vois Gaël, quand je disais qu'il ne servait à rien d"essayer d'écraser 
la concurrence à coup de fric, c'est ce que je voulais dire. À un moment 
donné, c'est le fric qui t'écrase.

GP

--
La Terre Promise
Avec Ariel Sharon dans le rôle du nouveau messie d'Israël
http://pages.infinit.net/mcrit/sionisme.html