Mandriva Fires Founder Gael Duval, Who Plans to Sue

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.

OSS immunity

[by Anonymous Coward]

Well of course being open source. We're immune from situations like this.

Re:OSS immunity

[hey! (33014)]

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

[Winckle (870180)]

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

[madaxe42 (690151)]

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!

Re:This is truly a sad day

[ryants (310088)]

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

Re:This is truly a sad day

[Wylfing (144940)]

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.

Re:This is truly a sad day

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

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]

Re:This is truly a sad day

[ryants (310088)]

Should I look at Ubuntu or Kanotix? One thing I really like about Mandr* is the PLF packages

I'm a soon-to-be former Mandriva Silver Club member, and I'm looking at Ubuntu.

I believe the Ubuntu equivalent to PLF is the Multiverse [ubuntu.com].

Re:This is truly a sad day

[g2devi (898503)]

> I believe the Ubuntu equivalent to PLF is the Multiverse.

Actually, the Ubuntu equivalent to PLF is the PLF:-)
http://wiki.ubuntu-fr.org/doc/plf [ubuntu-fr.org]

Many have bailed on them already though.

[Lumpy (12016)]

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.

[johnlenin1 (140093)]

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.

Reminds me of Caldera

[RLiegh (247921)]

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...

[R2.0 (532027)]

Call it TruMandriva or somesuch, and all his adherents will follow him.

Let the legal goodness commence!

Re:He should fork it...

[jejones (115979)]

Why bother when there's already PCLinuxOS [pclinuxos.com]? texstar does very good work...

Potentially good

[cheinz (714431)]

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.

Say what, now?

[DysenteryInTheRanks (902824)]

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

[b17bmbr (608864)]

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.

[ninjaz (1202)]

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.

Ulteo copyright infringers?

[Bogtha (906264)]

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.

Re:You gotta be kidding me.

[stinerman (812158)]

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.

Re:You gotta be kidding me.

[Jason Hood (721277)]

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.

Re:You gotta be kidding me.

[Tim Browse (9263)]

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.

Re:How is it abusive? He shouldn't sue at all

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

Most states are right to work so they can do that.

France, where Mandrake was based and where his employment contract was signed, is not a state of the United States of America.

Re:How is it abusive? He shouldn't sue at all

[Xzzy (111297)]

France, where Mandrake was based and where his employment contract was signed, is not a state of the United States of America.

A regrettable oversight. We'll get to you guys once we're done with Iran.

Re:How is it abusive? He shouldn't sue at all

[A.K.A_Magnet (860822)]

As you may be aware, there are other countries with their own laws. Mandriva being based in France, which has laws to protect employees against abusive (ie, not motivated by repetitive mistakes of the employee, and a bunch of other factors) layoffs, Gael can sue Mandriva. Then some particular kind of judges (called "juges des prud'hommes") will decide if it's ok or not, and of course, if it's not, they won't force him back into Mandriva, but Mandriva may have to give some indemnities.