Mandriva S.A., the publicly-traded French company which developed the famed Linux distro with the same name, is fighting for its survival: money is shrinking and the shareholders are battling to find a solution out of the financial cul de sac they have put themselves in.
Mandriva Linux started facing a pretty troubled phase of its life when the most part of the distro developers were forced, almost one year and half ago, to fork the project into Mageia Linux. Mandriva laid off the coders while liquidating its subsidiary Edge-IT, in an effort to find new investors willing to further support the company.
Since September 2010, Mandriva S.A. announced and then withdrew vague external bids to invest into the company and possible declarations of bankruptcy, while trying to secure enough money to stay operational another couple of weeks or so.
Now comes the word from Chief Operating Officer Jean-Manuel Croset that “a recapitalization has been approved and will be fulfilled in 10 days”, which means that the company has secured more funds to continue working on Mandriva Linux code while seeking a way out its perpetual crisis.
Mandriva is seemingly searching for a new direction for its Linux distro to choose between a community-driven desktop distribution model or a more enterprise-oriented model like the Red Hat and Fedora ones, and Croset states that the company’s “strategy review” will be now finalized and “the corresponding decisions taken mid of May”.
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