LWN conducted an interview with MandrakeSoft’s Gaël Duval
addressing some of the news from the last few days. Despite
predictions of his company’s imminent demise, Duval is optimistic,
and LWN says “MandrakeSoft looks like it is in reasonably good
shape.”
“The situation is strange because the growth
perspectives have never been as good as now: all data show that
Linux is gaining market share every day. But at the same time, the
financial markets are depressed, which has brought some young and
fragile Linux companies, such as Eazel, to an end. It’s bad because
Eazel was kind of a symbol of the new Linux era, and at the same
time there was much hope in their products.So I think the key word is currently “psychology”. It’s NOT
because some some startups have been killed by the stock markets
that Linux is going bad. Linux is going very well: Linux 2.4 is an
extremely nice OS, the new versions of KDE and GNOME are
incredible. On the business side, we are growing quickly, I know
Red Hat is planning profitability soon. We are really far away from
the Internet companies!”