French firm behind Mandriva Linux goes out of business
The French software firm behind the once-popular Linux distribution Mandriva has shut its doors.
A noticed posted by the company states that it is under liquidation after having been in operation for 16 years.
The company, which is listed as having between 10 and 19 employees, pulled in €553,600 in 2013 - apparently not enough to keep the operation afloat.
In the mid-2000s Mandriva Linux was one of the top 10 Linux distributions, but today it hovers around 80th position, behind OpenMandriva and Mageia, a fork of Mandriva created following a partnership between Mandriva and Russia's ROSA Software.
According to a profile by Techradar, in 2010 Mandriva took on Russian investors and announced it would continue developing server products for Europe while shifting its desktop distribution development to BRIC countries.
There were calls at the time for Mandriva to follow Red Hat's strategy of splitting itself into two, as Red Hat did with Enterprise Linux and Fedora.
The company famously got into a fight with Microsoft in Nigeria over whether Mandriva or Windows would be installed on about 10,000 Intel Classmate PCs.
A government contractor had originally ordered the PCs with Mandriva installed but later and without explanation requested Windows. There were claims at the time that Microsoft had offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to the contractor to promote Windows. Ultimately however, Mandriva was installed on the PCs.
The company had also won a deal in 2010 to supply schools in Brazil with low-cost laptops running its distribution, an agreement that could have seen the distro installed on as many as 1.5 million PCs. More recently it inked a deal with partners in Malaysia to support the OS there.
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