Mandriva S.A. is a publicly traded (symbol:MDKFF) Linux and open source software company with its headquarters in Paris, France and development center in Curitiba, Brazil. Mandriva, S.A. is the creator and maintainer of Mandriva Linux, describing itself as a "project initiator and a skills organizer in the Open Source arena", and a founding member of the Desktop Linux Consortium.

Mandriva, S.A. began as MandrakeSoft in 1998. It currently has about 130 employees (80 of whom are engineers) and has offices in France, the USA, and Brazil. The company sells its products in more than 140 countries and estimates the number of Mandriva Linux users to be in the 6-to-8 million range.

MandrakeSoft was forced to change its name as a result of losing litigation to the Hearst Corporation over the name Mandrake. The litigation concluded in February 2004, and appeals expired in early 2005. The litigation arose because of Hearst Corporation's claim to the name "Mandrake", inspired by the comic Mandrake the Magician; forcing MandrakeSoft to change its name. In 2005, MandrakeSoft acquired the assets of Lycoris, and purchased Conectiva. As a result of the forced name change, the name Mandriva was selected to reflect the combination of MandrakeSoft and Conectiva.

On 2008-01-16, Mandriva and Turbolinux announced a partnership to create a lab named Manbo-Labs, to share resources and technology to release a common base system for both companies Linux distributions.

Innovations

Mandriva has, like other Linux distributions, created several applications that give it a distinctive feel. The urpmi package management tools and the suite of graphical system configuration tools contained in the Mandriva Control Center are probably the most notable, along with nspluginwrapper which allows x86-32 plugins to be used within a x86-64 browser.

Another example is transfugdrake, a tool designed for easy migration of documents and settings from Microsoft Windows to Mandriva Linux. It is a front end to Migration Assistant with a unique interface and several improvements and bug fixes.

Financial state

MandrakeSoft operated under bankruptcy protection from January 27, 2003 to March 30, 2004. The déclaration de cessation de paiement (similar to the US Chapter 11) gave the company protection from its creditors. MandrakeSoft recorded its first quarterly profit since 1999 of €270,000 on €1.42 million of revenue during the period between October 2003 and December 2003.

Shares of Mandrakesoft are again being traded on the Euronext Marché Libre exchange (ISIN code MLMAN) and on the US OTC Bulletin Board (Stock symbol MDKFF).

Mandriva Club