[Mageia-discuss] Will Mageia meet small businesses' needs?

[Marcello Anni]

> 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