> Hello. > > I've been using Mandrake and Mandriva for about 8 years, and I used to pay > for it. I stopped paying because of the poor quality of Mandriva Store > service. Now I have a small web creation business: Fiable.biz . > http://Fiable.biz > We still use Mandriva 2009 spring in 2 computers, but shifted this year to > Ubuntu for 2 others. > > My concern is: will Mageia meet the needs of small businesses?
i think it is too early to have already a specific business plan and development strategies. Now the mageia guys are working hard to make available the whole structure and basic web-service, then we can discuss about strategy,business model, etc... > 1) Small businesses are not very interested by the famous "pro-choice" > policy of Mandriva. I would prefer a system that JUST WORKS rather than > the choice between several buggy solutions (KDE/Gnome, Kmail/Thunderbird > etc.). And I just don't think a small company or a small community can > maintain so many different competitive solutions. Making choice requires a > strong management, because any choice will make some users unhappy. But my > experience is that any computer system, because of its legacy, becomes > heavier and heavier, and is one day replaced by a simpler, completely new > one, with no legacy. I've just given up Firefox for Chromium for that. The > weakest is the management, the quickest the system become unmanageable. a distro community driven can't choose what their contributors must do, anyway thing like this: if the contributor (that uses E17) can't contribute to it, it won't contribute to KDE4, but probably he will simply change distro, so no manpower is wasted. > 2) Small businesses need a paid, affordable, reliable SUPPORT. Forums are > helpful, but quite often one doesn't find the needed answer that way. The > payment should of course be possible by MasterCard or Visa card. sure. if we plan to sell specific payment versions of mageia, we need a support service (always available and efficient), we can't rely only on forums. > 3) Small businesses need an efficient way to FIND INFORMATION QUICKLY. > Fragmented information systems like official web pages + mailing list + > wiki + forums + bugzilla + support pages, some of these in different > languages, make information very difficult to find. Although English is > the mother tongue of nobody at Fiable.biz, I would prefer no mailing list, > no forum, no support system, but an English wiki with discussion in the > wiki's discussion pages, rather than in forums, an English bugzilla for > bugs and enhancement wishes, and possibly wikis in other languages with > systematic links to the corresponding English page. i think the basic informations could all be found in the wiki (+web-site with description of the distro and informations to download), bugzilla, ML and others are for contributors > > 4) Some small businesses, like Fiable.biz, would be very interested in > MULTISEAT (several seats on one central unit), because it's cheaper than > buying one computer per employee. Unfortunately, this is not provided in > an easy way by any distribution, as far as I know. If you know a > distribution provided this, please let me know. this could be an idea. keep it on mind : ) > I suggest you make your plans a bit more precise and wish you good luck. these days we should have a manifesto, then we'll try to resolve all the others big and minor issues... cheers, Marcello
