This is a transcript of one of many short video segments which will be added to the Digital Tipping Point (DTP) archive. In this particular segment, Jean Francois talks a bit more about Mandriva's revenues. Of course, there are sales of Mandriva desktop Linux in stores like Best Buy, but many of Mandriva's customers are large institutional customers like the French Air Force, France Telecom, the French Ministry of Education, and so forth. For these customers, Mandriva builds specialized distros that has just exactly the software that the customer wants, customized to that customer's needs. Mandriva also trains the customers work force, and supports the entire process.

At the time of the interview, Mandriva (then known as MandrakeSoft) had 20,000 members of its MandrakeSoft club, who paid an annual subscription fee for priviledged downloads and insider information. MandrakeSoft also derived royalties from hardware vendors who bundled MandrakeSoft GNU/Linux on there hardware. Most of MandrakeSoft's revenues at the time of the interview came from North America.

You can click here to watch the video for this transcript.

tape id = e-dv176_sf_01_boncilhon_002.mpg

Thanks to DTP crew member Jim Stockford for transcribing this tape!

The DTP will be many, many films created by the global open source video community about how open source is changing their lives. We, the DTP crew, are submitting this footage for anyone to rip, mix, and burn under the Creative Commons Attribute - ShareAlike license. We welcome edits, transcriptions, graphics, music, and animation contributions to the film. Please send a link for any contributions to Christian Einfeldt at einfeldt at gmail.com.