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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.
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 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)
      (http://kamthaka.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 30 2005, @03:18PM)
      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."
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:OSS immunity by IPFreely (Score:2) Thursday March 16 2006, @11:31AM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • This is truly a sad day (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Winckle (870180) <mwinckle@nosPAM.gmail.com> on Wednesday March 15 2006, @04:55PM (#14927943)
    (http://www.winckle.co.uk/)
    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.
  • His own fault (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 15 2006, @04:58PM (#14927976)
    If you start the company, you dictate the policies. If he gave up his power to someone else (and for profit, likely), he should have expected this possibility. Still a dick thing to do, though.
  • by Lumpy (12016) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @04:59PM (#14927995)
    (http://timgray.blogspot.com/)
    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.
  • Reminds me of Caldera (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RLiegh (247921) * on Wednesday March 15 2006, @04:59PM (#14927997)
    (http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday July 29, @04:31PM)
    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
  • 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.
  • Penguin Suit (Score:1, Funny)

    by dotslashdot (694478) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:07PM (#14928074)
    It was only a matter of time before someone brought a Penguin suit.
  • You gotta be kidding me. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Douglas Simmons (628988) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:07PM (#14928076)
    (http://assambassador.com/)
    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.
  • I have been fired only 48 hours after working for one place with no reason at all other than the manager didn't like me.

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

    Employers have the right to fire people on spot for any reason at all. The reason why I am agaisnt suing is because its unfair that blue collar workers such as myself have no right at all and get paid 1/5th what the upper middle class white collar workers do which do sue for wrongfull termination. We have no rights at all and have to sign contracts making us employed at will.

    And most states even the CEO can be fired for no reason at all if its a right to work state.

    Also the shareholders own the company and yes if the CEO owns less then %50 of the company then he can be fired. Its just part of business. ANd if you owned a company I think most people would have a different opinion as bad workers can make or break your company and take your dreams down with it when you go under.

  • by Jerry (6400) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:12PM (#14928123)
    just in time.

    Mandrake 8.2 was that distro's best release, IMO. I left it when they had that "burn your CDROM up" problem. Not for that, but because I felt it was going down hill. Now I run SimplyMEPIS.

    A few weeks ago I booted a LiveCD of PCLinuxOS. It is, IMO, much better than Mandriva, from which it is derived. They have cleaned many of the bugs out. For those who run Mandriva I hope that PCLinuxOS has the horsepower to keep that distro alive on their own. I prefer distros that use *.deb packages so I won't be leaving SimplyMEPIS anytime soon.
  • Please.....'abusive layoff'?? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:16PM (#14928175)
    Suing for "abusive layoff."

    wtf? Is there such thing as a 'feel-good' layoff? If you're going to sue for wrongful dismaissal, at least get the wording right if you bitch publicly
  • Help me out here. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by AnonymousPrick (956548) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:17PM (#14928187)
    This is a just business transaction. It happens all the time. If Gael Duval wants to, he can just create (yet) another distro that will abide by his Linux philosophy. How is this a tragedy or something bad - other than for him - maybe?
  • Say what, now? (Score:5, Funny)

    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.
  • by elucido (870205) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @05:49PM (#14928447)
    I guess, he is now layed off, the question is this, who owns the company now? Can we trust them?
  • 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. by ReinoutS (Score:3) Wednesday March 15 2006, @06:14PM
      • Re:Ouch. by ninjaz (Score:2) Wednesday March 15 2006, @07:01PM
    • Re:Ouch. by civilizedINTENSITY (Score:2) Wednesday March 15 2006, @06:23PM
      • Re:Ouch. by Schraegstrichpunkt (Score:2) Wednesday March 15 2006, @06:56PM
        • Re:Ouch. by RobertLTux (Score:1) Wednesday March 15 2006, @08:16PM
        • Re:Ouch. by civilizedINTENSITY (Score:2) Tuesday March 28 2006, @02:29AM
    • Donate to a for-profit entity? by massysett (Score:2) Wednesday March 15 2006, @08:10PM
  • 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?
  • Just deserts (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Black Art (3335) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @06:31PM (#14928774)
    Now he knows how all those Americans he fired felt when he closed down all the American operations for Mardrake a number of years back. (Just for being Americans.)

    Could not have happened to a more deserving fellow.
  • 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.

  • replaced by Ubuntu (Score:2)

    by idlake (850372) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @07:02PM (#14929044)
    From my point of view, the place of Mandrake as an easy-to-use desktop distribution has been taken by Ubuntu. I know--they are very different distributions internally, but to me, they feel similar.
  • I for one am sad (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Dollyknot (216765) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @08:24PM (#14929503)
    (http://dollyknot.com/)
    For me computers have always been a hobby, I started out around 1983 with a TRS80 then a BBC micro, taught myself assembler, in Z80 then 6502, then I had to leave my hobby because my job as a truck driver meant I was away most of the time. Then around 1995 I came off the road and took up my old hobby again, a 286 running 3.1 then '95 then '98 then ME, finally the penny dropped.

    I realised how immoral a closed source operating system is and decided to give Linux a try.

    This was around the year 2000, Suse to be precise, could not get on the net with it, could not get Xserver to work. Then I tried Coral linux, Xserver worked fine, could not get dialup to work, then I tried Redhat that did not work either.

    Then I heard about Mandrake (probably on Slash :) at last I had an open source OS that seemed to work with hardly any hassle.

    Gael Duval, opened the open source OS door for me and for many others I would imagine. What the organisation that Duval started, solved was the driver problem, for this he deserves respect and support from the Linux community and I hope the Slashdot community.

    Regards

    Peter

  • Pull an Apple (Score:1)

    by sankyuu (847178) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @08:35PM (#14929552)
    (Last Journal: Monday November 06 2006, @09:08PM)
    Supposing Duval started a new project... any chance Mandriva would screw up, acquire Duval, and make him chief once more? Something like the Apple fairy tale.
  • Underlaying issue is revenue (Score:2, Interesting)

    by viking2000 (954894) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @08:57PM (#14929671)
    As a software engineer, it is frustrating to see how hard it is for software companies to find a profitable business model.

    I have actively tried to find work with companies where the core product is software. The reaon is simply that of opportunity. In a hospital, at an attorneys office etc, a software developer can never be the strong voice in corporate meetings. It is the attorney and physician respectively. The SW engineer can not advance to the top of the corporate ladder.

    The closest I have found is engineering companes like Cisco where engineers are paid well. Although an engineering company, the focus here is still not software, but hardware.

    Most High tech companies sell boxes and software is used by the sales department to land the deal. Often discounting it 100% at "no charge".

    It is then hard to fight with the HW group for resources when you have little revenue to justify your departments existence.

    We all love to hate Microsoft, but they are one of the few companies that have been successfull and profitable as a software company.

    How should a company like Mandrake structure their business model so they can be consistently profitable, and not have to go through bankruptcies and tough layoffs?

    I need to be able to have a well paying stable job so I can put my kids through college. Any solutions out there?
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • by kbulgrien (961505) on Wednesday March 15 2006, @11:01PM (#14930219)
    Mr. Duval said in his IRC interview...

    "It seems that the company is going to address the corporate market more and more.... My opinion is that we should have stuck to the roots (individuals and SOHO)."

    I have never seriously considered any other distribution since I bought my first box (7.1). Linux had not really arrived enough to replace my home Windows system, so I waited for 8.0 before trying seriously again. As a systems engineer working with UNIX systems, and after having great difficulty with UnixWare 2.0 at home, and lack of results with WGS Linux, I was glad to see Mandrake "arrive". I finally committed to Linux. Then I had an opportunity to manage a server for my engineering department and RedHat 7.2 with Mandrake 9.x, then 10.1, and now Corporate Server 3.0. I've tried others... and yet remain a Mandriva user, so something is very good over there.

    For all this, I must painfully acknowledge that Mandriva just convincing in any role that touts helping the community. The user has been told that if they pay, they will will get help. The user says show me what I get for free, and then I will believe, and will happily pay when it really matters.

    Mandriva has always offered more up front for the community in terms of graphical, customized tools for configuring the system so that the job gets done, but that is about where it ends. "After the sale" the user must largely rely on their own resourcefulness. The superiour Mandriva tools buy most users in, but consider that today, MandrivaExpert has 2600+ open issues dating back to 2003. Bugzilla is full of issues _never_ responded to.