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MandrakeSoft now profitable, says CEO Bancilhon

Asked about quality control problems that have plagued recent Mandrake releases, Bancilhon said, "I think we have improved a lot from 9.1 to 9.2."

Beyond that, he said, We are going to introduce something new with 10.0. We are going to have two versions of the system."

One will be "community," the other "official."

The "community" veresion is expected to be the first major Linux distribution that includes the 2.6 kernel. Two or three months later, the "official" version will also incorporate the new kernel.

Bancilhon expects to see updated versions of the "community version" every six months, while the "official" version will be on an 18 month release cycle.

Bancilhon said MandrakeSoft is not doing the same as Red Hat management has done with their split between Red Hat and Fedora. The "community" version of Mandrake will still be produced by company developers and supported by MandrakeSoft employees as part of their job, unlike the Fedora project which is produced outside of Red Hat's formal development structure and supported by volunteers.

Expenses down, income up

According to Bancilhon, MandrakeSoft is now down to 60 employees and has total corporate expenses of about 300 thousand Euros per month, while income from "Mandrake Club" subscriptions and other sources are up substantially. Not only that, raw downloads of the free Mandrake versions -- which often lead to users becoming paid subscribers -- are now in the range of "three to four million per year."

The vagueness in download figures is because MandrakeSoftw had no accurate download reporting mechanism in place until last quarter, said Bancilhon. But now he knows "it is growing. All my numbers are growing."

Will Mandrake be the only major KDE distro?

Bancilhon said, "We keep our principles. We are true to the open source model. We will keep having free downloads and a business model consistent with that."

He also said he expects SUSE to start using Gnome as its primary desktop now that Novell, which had already bought Ximian, has acquired the company. Red Hat is Gnome-oriented, and has developed its own "Bluecurve" desktop. Of the "bg three" corporate-produced Linux distributions, this would leave Mandrake as the only one with primary loyalty to KDE.

SUSE has traditionally been a major KDE supporter and has employed a number of KDE developers.

NewsForge asked Bancilhon what would happen to KDE -- and KDE-dependent Mandrake -- if SUSE stopped supporting its developers. "I don't know," he said. "I hope (by the time that happens) we'll have more room to support them."

Mandrake still loyal to individual desktop users

"50% of our customers are running desktops or laptops, 50% run Mandrake on servers," said Bancilhon. He noted that sales are to "60% individuals, 40% corporations."

He added, "Those individual users are the one who have supported the company. We'll keep supporting them. At the same time, we want to develop and strengthen our corporate offerings.

"Over the next year we are going to go after more corporate service and sales, starting in France.

At this point, according to Bancilhon, fewer than 15% of Mandrake users are in France, but he expects this to change with MandrakeSoft's new emphasis on actively seeking corporate customers in its own country, rather than relying so heavily on foreign sales.