<I>Mandrake in Trouble</I>

[mairving]

It looks like Mandrake's CEO has resigned and the company is not in good financial shape. The talk is of laying off their development team.

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[WickedLittleSlaveBoy]

sorry, a little off topic, I know...but is this statement from the article a little strange to anyone else?

Those figures showed that Mandrake Linux represented 33.8 percent of Linux retail sales in the quarter, with Red Hat Linux at 30.7 percent, SuSE at 23.8 percent, FreeBSD at 5.6 percent, Caldera at 2.5 percent, Corel with 2.3 percent and Turbolinux at 1.2 percent.

how does FreeBSD figure into Linux sales?

[mairving]

I often see it in the Linux category. I guess that they don't want to put it in it's own category nor in the Unix category so it gets thrown in with Linux. It is also suprising to see SUSE so high. The funniest thing of all is the word sales in all of this.

[WickedLittleSlaveBoy]

sales is a decent enough term, considering they have it packaged as a product, although I've been told that SuSE's support program shouldn't be categorized as such. SuSE doesn't suprise me so much. Fry's always has a copy of SuSE, Mandrake, Caldera and Red Hat. the suprise to me is that Caldera has let itself be that low.

as for bunching FreeBSD into the group, that's about the same as throwing OS/2 in with Windows sales by version. maybe they should think about changing the name they use to categorize all of the free OSes under.

as for Unix sales, that would most likely be Solaris on top, AIX next, HP-UX trailing and SCO, IRIX and the others way below. maybe Caldera's picked up SCO's defeatist attitude in their dealings with them.