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Mandriva Fires Founder Gael Duval, Who Plans to Sue

Posted by Roblimo on Wed Mar 15, 2006 04:52 PM
from the commercialism-trumps-community-once-again dept.
Businesses Mandriva Software Linux
Otter writes "Mandrake Linux founder Gael Duval has confirmed that Mandriva has let him go." A few hours later, Newsforge (owned by the same company that owns Slashdot) did an exclusive IRC interview with Gael in which he said he plans to sue his former employer for "abusive layoff." This is a sad day for Mandriva -- and for GNU/Linux in general. Gael was the founder and heart of the original Mandrake (now Mandriva) project, which was the first Linux distribution designed to be easy for non-technical users to install and administer. There is plenty of consternation in the Mandriva Club Forums about whether the company will go on supporting individual desktop users as strongly as it has in the past.
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[+] Slashback: ODF Wars, Duval Layoff, French DRM 274 comments
Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including a response from Mandriva's CEO, Apple responds to French DRM legislation, Microsoft possibly undermining ODF ISO approval, a more in-depth look at Fedora Core 5, more thoughts on the GPLv3, and Britannica strikes back at Wikipedia -- Read on for details.
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  • OSS immunity (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 15 2006, @04:54PM (#14927939)
    Well of course being open source. We're immune from situations like this.

    • Re:OSS immunity (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hey! (33014) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:46PM (#14928419) Homepage Journal
      Well of course being open source. We're immune from situations like this.

      Well, if not immune, at least less vulnerable.

      After all, suppose you spend ten years creating your Magnum Opus, the thing that's going to change the world. Then the managers you originally hired to handle the boring business stuff turn around and fire you. If your work is proprietary, that's it. Find a new life's work.

      Within open source, you go to the spare bedroom, pop the source CD's, and open up a new sourceforge project. Your employment agreement might be a bit of a hurdle, but with any luck it's written with proprietary software in mind. "Uh, your honor, I'm not selling any products that compete with my former employer."

  • This is truly a sad day (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Winckle (870180) <mwinckleNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday March 15 2006, @04:55PM (#14927943) Homepage
    I sincerely hope this does not affect the course of the distro, and that it continues to remain as user-friendly and true to it's founding values, but I'm beginning to think Ubuntu has replaced Mandrake/riva as the No 1 user-friendly distro.

    • Re:This is truly a sad day (Score:5, Funny)

      by madaxe42 (690151) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:00PM (#14928007) Homepage
      What about Gentoo? Wonderful community. And you end up with plenty of time to get to know them all, while you wait for it to build!

    • I sincerely hope this does not affect the course of the distro, and that it continues to remain as user-friendly and true to it's founding values, but I'm beginning to think Ubuntu has replaced Mandrake/riva as the No 1 user-friendly distro.

      I've been a Mandriva Club silver-level member for 2.5 years now, and I'm going to let my membership lapse in a few weeks. I downloaded the Ubuntu appliance [vmware.com] from VMWare a while ago, and it is far superior to Mandriva for ease-of-use, ease-of-administration. I'm jus

      • I sincerely hope this does not affect the course of the distro, and that it continues to remain as user-friendly and true to it's founding values, but I'm beginning to think Ubuntu has replaced Mandrake/riva as the No 1 user-friendly distro.

        I've been a Mandriva Club silver-level member for 2.5 years now, and I'm going to let my membership lapse in a few weeks. I downloaded the Ubuntu appliance from VMWare a while ago, and it is far superior to Mandriva for ease-of-use, ease-of-administration. I'm just waiting for the next version of Ubuntu in April to dump Mandriva from my desktop.

        I will echo that. I paid for my Mandrake Club and support contracts in my day. At the time (a few years ago) it was really the best out there for usability. There was always something they didn't get right, but less so than anyone else. But these days I run Ubuntu on the desktop and straight-dope Debian on the server. I was blown away by how well Ubuntu worked out of the box. Networking, including wireless, graphics, sound, everything just worked. (In all fairness, I did have to tweak xorg.conf one time to get the uberhigh screen resolutions I wanted, but that's it.)

        Now, all that said, I did highly value Mandrake in its day. Obviously, since I paid for it for 2 years. They vanguarded things like doing a gamer edition, which is something someone should revisit, seeing how good Cedega is at Windows games these days (I've been playing Morrowind under Cedega without incident for a few weeks now). I'm sad to see them take a blow of any kind, in the same way I am sad to see Dreamcast go under and Infocom disappear.

    • I've tried out Mandrake/Mandriva a number of times in the past. (I even did a review on version 10 here [intelligentblogger.com].) While they gained a lot of good will for being "user friendly", I always found them to be not worth the effort. The desktop feels nice and all, but the system always had some sort of problems that could never quite be resolved. It's hard to say why Mandrake always was so difficult to work with, but if I were to take a guess, I'd point a finger at their bleeding edge software. They are infamous for always packing in the latest and greatest. That same bleeding edge mentality is what got them in trouble with version 9.2.

      Bye bye, CD Drive. [theregister.co.uk]
    • This isn't the first time that a founder of a Linux distribution has left the project or taken a lessor role, but it certainly is surprising how the founder of the distribution was forced to leave.

      Back in 2003 when I bought my cutting edge PC hardware, I was having little luck getting into the Linux world. I was a noob, with poorly supported hardware in Linux. Specifically a ICHR5 S-ATA controller on my ASUS motherboard. Slackware failed to boot, Fedora Core failed to boot, as did Debian. One distro did wor
    • I converted to Ubuntu a few weeks ago after a few failed attempts to move over to Linux. There was always *something* that kept me from keeping it. Poor sound support and other basic hardware problems were experienced with everything from Slackware to Fedora to Mandrake. So I gave up for a while.

      I'd been hearing a lot of good things about Ubuntu and decided to give it a shot.

      I'm impressed.

      For the first time, I've installed a Linux distro where *everything* worked out of the box. There are some minor ann
    • but I'm beginning to think Ubuntu has replaced Mandrake/riva as the No 1 user-friendly distro.

      I disagree. I disagree because because my experience of Mandrake is that the user experience has been far worse than its rivals and if you asked me what the No.1 User Friendly distro was a few years back, it certainly wouldn't be Mandrake. Red Hat perhaps, SUSE probably not, but no way Mandrake. The "Drak" tools were consistently buggy, marred by horrible usability issues, not very task oriented and were slapped

  • Many have bailed on them already though. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lumpy (12016) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @04:59PM (#14927995) Homepage
    at the local LUG many users bailed on t hem after the mess that was Mandriva 2006. It is buggy and has problems compared to the Mandrake version just before it. That started a flocking to Ubuntu and Gentoo at the LUG (A 100 pack of Ubuntu Cd's coming in that month did not help matters either.

    They really dropped the QC on the distro they released right after the Mandriva change and that really hurt them.

    Now the management is making changes inside as well.

    • Re:Many have bailed on them already though. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by johnlenin1 (140093) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:28PM (#14928289)
      To add another anecdote: I've used Mandr[ake|iva] since v. 7, and was just about to bail on them after the "2005 LE" version. I even let my club membership lapse. I put Kubuntu "Hoary Hedgehog" on my work desktops and found it to be superior in many respects, and "Breezy" even more so.

      However, I recently tried Mandriva 2006 Free on my MythTV box at home, and it was a breeze in every respect. I was up and running hours quicker than with Kubuntu on the same machine. Mandriva also seemed more polished and stable for me, the first Mandriva distro in years that didn't regularly crash inexplicably on this computer.

      Still, too bad about Gael, though.

      • Too bad they kept Openoffice.org 2 out of their latest free release, saving it for the club members.

        The key word here is support. Mandriva 2006 had a release schedule. Had they included OO.o2, they would have had to support a hardly tested pre-release version of it for years to come. They've been bitten before by including RC-quality software (KDE 2.99 iirc) and I think it's very understandable they don't want such a disaster to happen again.

        Yes, OO.o2 is now available on the Club, but it is still uns

  • Reminds me of Caldera (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RLiegh (247921) * on Wednesday March 15 2006, @04:59PM (#14927997) Homepage Journal
    Caldera had a semi-decent mostly commerical OS out there, and then when they were bought up they slowly but certainly dropped any pretense of being interested in the home/enthusiast market. Of course, Mandrake had much more of a tie with the community; but it seems their tie to the community just walked out the door, didn't it?

    Let's hope Mandriva doesn't suddenly decide that its' IP is in the linus kernel!

  • He should fork it... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by R2.0 (532027) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @04:59PM (#14927998)
    Call it TruMandriva or somesuch, and all his adherents will follow him.

    Let the legal goodness commence!

  • Maybe not bad (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Life700MB (930032) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:06PM (#14928057)

    Mandrake was my distro of choice before seeing the Light and converting to Debian, and I remember that it was a great distribution... but somewhere they lost the path and starting falling to the ground: the LG drives fiasco, the name change, the bloat, the battle with Ubuntu for the easy-to-use-linux crown...

    Maybe Gael has now the oportunity to create from zero a great new distribution without the inherents problems of Mandrake/Mandriva!

    I sincerely hope so.


    --
    Superb hosting [tinyurl.com] 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95
    • Maybe Gael has now the oportunity to create from zero a great new distribution without the inherents problems of Mandrake/Mandriva!

      Maybe Canonical (Ubuntu) can hire him.

  • Potentially good (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cheinz (714431) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:07PM (#14928068)
    I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that this may not be such a bad thing. Mr. Duval may now start another project, and build something good again. Mandrake(driva) had really started to fall off a few releases ago in my opinion. Many people I know are using Fedora now that used Mandrake in the past. I certainly feel bad that Mr. Duval is now unemployed, but perhaps we can build something positive out of this. Mandrake used to be the distro I told people to start with, lately it's been Ubuntu. Perhaps this can be a day remembered as the day a new distro was born, and it was also today that Mandriva lost a great asset. Just trying to remain positive.

  • You gotta be kidding me. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Douglas Simmons (628988) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:07PM (#14928076) Homepage
    What is happening to the right to fire? We're not even talking non-union workers here. A company, public and private too, ought to be able to fire in accordance with that sole law of maximizing shareholder wealth for public companies -- If the given employee is not helping an organization pursue that goal, that should be cause enough.
    • At-will employment maybe the norm in the USA, but that isn't the case everywhere.

      • Re:You gotta be kidding me. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Jason Hood (721277) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:32PM (#14928325)
        To me, that is a scary thought.

        If I own a business, I have the right as theowner to discontinue paying them for their services at anytime for any reason unless I have signed a contract with them stipulating otherwise. To think that I cannot fire an employee for poor performance or bad decision making sounds absolutely insane.

        Mandriva has every right to terminate his employment for _nearly_ any reason.

        • Well, no, not actually...you also have to abide by the Laws of the United States, and the State in which you do business. Firing someone for "poor performance or bad decision making" isn't so much a problem, though, as firing people because they are brown or black, or firing people who don't go to the "right" church.

          I believe it is true (or so they taught in International Business) that in Europe it is much more difficult to fire someone, including applying for permission with the government prior to fi

          • Re:You gotta be kidding me. (Score:4, Informative)

            by Tim Browse (9263) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @07:16PM (#14929140)
            including applying for permission with the government prior to firing the person.

            The UK govt. doesn't get involved (and I doubt any other European govts do either) with people being fired on an everyday basis - I mean, how would they ever get any work done?*

            In the UK, there are such things as industrial tribunals, where you can go and argue that you were unfairly dismissed - i.e. there was no good reason to dismiss you (to the poster who worried that they wouldn't be able to fire someone for poor performance or bad decision making - of course these are grounds for dismissal in the UK - but some guy putting sugar in the boss's coffee by mistake when the boss is having a bad day is not).

            What you might have been told about is that when a company makes people redundant (downsizing), if they let go more than a certain number of people, they have to warn the govt. in advance. If you let go of more than 25-30 people, you have to give a month's warning, and there's another threshold for 3 month's warning. I'm guessing similar arrangements may exist elsewhere in Europe.

            * Leave it.

        • You may be the owner of the business and the one paying the salary, but you are also asking your employee to make an investment in you and your time. For the same reason as you'd generally require them to give notice and so forth - and most contracts only allow the employer the right to pay in lieu of notice, and not for the employee to leave "at will". Not saying you shouldn't be allowed to employ who you like, as you like, but if you require a commitment from your employees, they should be able to require

    • Re:You gotta be kidding me. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by stinerman (812158) <nathan...stine@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:21PM (#14928217) Homepage
      Many places in Europe, IIRC, you can't just fire anyone for any reason.

      While there may be a legal right to terminate employees, one I certainly don't agree with, for any reason in the USA, it is ultimately counterproductive due to decreased worker morale. I know I'd think twice about working for a company who fires their employees on whims. I'd also do poor work if I had to continuously worry that today might be my last day.

      • I know I'd think twice about working for a company who fires their employees on whims. I'd also do poor work if I had to continuously worry that today might be my last day.

        And thus the system self regulates. Due to the deep complexity of the US economy, this model works. Employees can quit and move on to another company. In smaller markets, this may not work since there may not be acceptable substitutes but in the US economy, it works very well.

        Just look at EDS, its a shadow of what it once was because of f
      • Many places in Europe, IIRC, you can't just fire anyone for any reason

        Correct. And this being France, there are some very strict laws about when someone can be fired. The net result of this is that lawsuit about being fired are common, companies are afraid to hire people, and companies can't weather downturns or adapt by firing people. Gee, and the French wonder why their economy isn't as strong as they want it to be.

        Before anyone says anything - I actually grew up there and still have family there. Whi

        • Yeah, sure (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Omaze (952134)
          In the US we have a better end-run around that sort of thing. We just place unreasonable goals and expectations on our employees, underpay them, and ride them as hard as we can. Then when they begin to come apart at the seams (and begin to manifest the personality traits of someone who's being driven to the edge of their sanity) we can label them as underperforming, or bad behavior, or anti-social. If they don't acquiesce to the subsequent managerial flogging we can then terminate them. The company docu
    • Well, corporations are permitted to exist because they are perceived to increase the public good. When they don't, then they have violated their mandate. I've got news for some people, capitalism is not an ethos. It so happens that it seems to be of greater public benefit than competing systems. When you start justifying your means to the detriment of your ends, you've lost your ethical compass, and it's time to recalibrate.

    • Legally and economically, I agree with you completely.

      But unless the person is doing something illegal or blatantly against the rules, I don't think it's in their best interest to fire such a high profile employee. The drop in overall employee morale will probably cost them a lot more than keeping the guy on, and the public perception that they need to fire the founder to stay afloat will probably hurt them even more.

      • Which makes the USA the best place in the world to start a small business as well as wealth creation.

        Small business and startups have an insane near %90 failure rate 2 years after they open. Bad employees will make it much higher. If your retirement savings and home were used as equilateral for the loan for your business then you lose that too and perhaps your marriage if it fails due to a couple of bad apples that you need to fire.

        Capitalism is the most efficient system around and this is coming from someo
        • I usually don't bother people much over typos and whatnot, but this one kinda caught my eye:

          If your retirement savings and home were used as equilateral

          Presumably collateral?

          I'd work up something funny based off of what you said, but it just doesn't jive in any way I can think of.
          • >>If your retirement savings and home were used as equilateral

            >Presumably collateral?

            >I'd work up something funny based off of what you said, but it just doesn't jive in any way I can think of.

            You're just not coming up with the right _angle_. _Try_ harder, you'll get there by degrees. Or just make an acute observation.

  • Say what, now? (Score:5, Funny)

    by DysenteryInTheRanks (902824) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:24PM (#14928254) Homepage
    The "exclusive IRC interview?" Not exactly Mike Wallace or Sam Donaldson, is it?

    Seriously, though, the White House press corps should pick this up. "Next on NBC Nightly News, our exclusive IRC interview with the president."

    * PublicistLackey has joined #whouse
    * StonezzzPhilipsNBC has joined #whouse
    * W has joined #whouse

    [StonezzzPhilipsNBC] Prez, why r u h8ing on detainees @ Gitmo + Abu?
    * StonezzzPhilips kicked from #whouse
    [W] Next question?

  • but the product declined (Score:5, Informative)

    by b17bmbr (608864) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:38PM (#14928356)
    I was a dedicated drake user for years. And yes, I bought their product. I bought 7.0, 7.2, and 9.2. It always recognized all my hardware, was easy to upgrade, and had all the necessary tools, etc. Then 10.x kinda sucked, and the latest incarnations were poor. Hardware recognition slacked, it didn't install on the same system that 9.x installed on, and now, they have subscriber support only for some wifi cards.

    I installed ubuntu and never looked back. it recognized all my hardware (even the USB wifi), and apt-get is far superior. It's a sad day for sure, but they only have themselves to blame. They made poor financial decisions and it hurt their product. Now, I do confess to having been an iBook user for a few years and haven't used linux nearly as much. Most of my development is LAMP, java, python, etc., and it's all the same on OS X or linux. OO.org runs great, and so does GIMP, and with fink/darwinports, I don't "need" linux. So, I haven't used a "PC" in quite some time, but that doesn't diminsh the fact that my one remianing PC at homeruns ubuntu not mandriva.

  • Ouch. (Score:5, Informative)

    by ninjaz (1202) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:58PM (#14928519)
    I've been using Mandrake since 2001, when I switched from Debian to get a version of X that would support my new video card. At the time, it was was flourishing, engaged the community surrounding it, and was hiring developers who were working on projects that were making crucial advances for Linux. One that comes to mind was the developer of a partition resizer that would work on NTFS back when when all the other distros were instructing their users to use Partition Magic.

    Of course, all that great work had a price tag attached to it, so when Mandrake Club was announced, I was first in line to join. The idea back then was that it was a voluntary donation with no extra benefits other than supporting continued development.

    Unfortunately, once the club started to take off, they started closing things off to the public one by one to drive membership numbers higher. Now it's to the point where standard members can't even download the full set of CD images for their $60 yearly membership fees.

    Something seems to have really changed in a big way since the Connectiva merger, though. With the release of Mandriva 2006, they've been focusing on marketing deals like that with Skype. Then, there was the worldwide Mandriva party, where the locations weren't announced until the night before... until then, there was just a form to fill out for organizations to get corporate schwag.

    Also, I was reading on the Mandriva forums earlier that the reason their cut of X.org doesn't work with my ATI Radeon 7500 is that they "chose the wrong X.org" and are staying with it due to an Intel marketing agreement. Luckily, seerofsouls.org has working RPM's, but needing to depend on a third party to provide core components of the distribution is not exactly ideal.

    Anyway, it looks like their management has decided that it wants to be Red Hat or Novell. I wish them good luck with that. I've seen it mentioned that PCLinuxOS is trying to be what Mandrake was, so hopefully they will provide a good upgrade path from Mandriva so I can get off this sinking ship without getting my clothes too wet.

    • Re:Ouch. (Score:3, Informative)

      by ReinoutS (1919)

      Now it's to the point where standard members can't even download the full set of CD images for their $60 yearly membership fees.

      Of course, the fact that you can download any missing packages by adding a random public FTP mirror to your urpmi media makes that a non-issue.

      Luckily, seerofsouls.org has working RPM's, but needing to depend on a third party to provide core components of the distribution is not exactly ideal.

      A version of X.org that works with your graphics card, too, is included in the di

  • Abusive Layoff (Score:3, Interesting)

    by duffbeer (114852) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @06:22PM (#14928687)
    Google returns effectively 1 hit for this term. Can anyone elaborate? What exactly would constitute an abusive layoff?

  • Ulteo copyright infringers? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bogtha (906264) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @06:41PM (#14928856)

    Duval's future plans -- in addition to the lawsuit -- involve a new open source project called Ulteo [ulteo.com].

    Ulteo [ulteo.com] seem to have ripped off Mozilla.org's [mozilla.org] web design. They even use the same class names. If you view their stylesheets [ulteo.com], you'll see:

    /* mozilla.org Base Styles
    * maintained by fantasai
    * (classes defined in the Markup Guide - http://mozilla.org/contribute/writing/markup )
    */

    If you read the Mozilla.org site licensing policies [mozilla.org], you'll see:

    The rights in the trademarks, logos, service marks of the Mozilla Foundation, as well as the look and feel of this web site, are not licensed under the Creative Commons license, and to the extent they are works of authorship (like logos and graphic design), they are not included in the work that is licensed under those terms.

    Seems to me that Mozilla.org want their text copied, but not their site design, which is the exact opposite of what Ulteo have done.

    • In France, a country in Western Europe (near Belgium), they have such a thing as 'licenciement abusif'. This is a standard term of employment law.

      'Licenciement' is French (the language spoken in France, and other countries such as Belgium) for layoff. 'Abusif' is French for 'abusive'.

      HTH. HAND.

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