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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.
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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Mandriva Fires Founder Gael Duval, Who Plans to Sue
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OSS immunity (Score:5, Funny)
Re:OSS immunity (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://kamthaka.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 30 2005, @03:18PM)
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)
(http://www.winckle.co.uk/)
Re:This is truly a sad day (Score:5, Informative)
I believe the Ubuntu equivalent to PLF is the Multiverse [ubuntu.com].
Re:This is truly a sad day (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the Ubuntu equivalent to PLF is the PLF:-)
http://wiki.ubuntu-fr.org/doc/plf [ubuntu-fr.org]
Re:This is truly a sad day (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is truly a sad day (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Friday December 23 2005, @06:30PM)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.intelligentblogger.com/ | Last Journal: Monday August 27, @11:47AM)
Bye bye, CD Drive. [theregister.co.uk]
His own fault (Score:2, Informative)
Many have bailed on them already though. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://timgray.blogspot.com/)
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)
(http://www.russianpoetry.net/)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday July 29, @04:31PM)
Let's hope Mandriva doesn't suddenly decide that its' IP is in the linus kernel!
He should fork it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Let the legal goodness commence!
Re:He should fork it... (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe not bad (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Penguin Suit (Score:1, Funny)
You gotta be kidding me. (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://assambassador.com/)
Re:You gotta be kidding me. (Score:4, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Informative)
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:You gotta be kidding me. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://stinerman.livejournal.com/)
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.
How is it abusive? He shouldn't sue at all (Score:2, Informative)
(http://www.livejournal.com/users/sinistertim101 | Last Journal: Saturday March 24 2007, @12:32PM)
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.
Re:How is it abusive? He shouldn't sue at all (Score:5, Informative)
(http://theravensnest.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 07, @07:05AM)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
(http://tru7h.org)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.mithrandir.net/)
PCLinuxOS seems to have arrived ... (Score:2)
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)
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)
Say what, now? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.televisio...com/show.cgi?show=44)
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)
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.
Looks like the founder got unfounded. (Score:1)
Ouch. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Abusive Layoff (Score:3, Interesting)
Just deserts (Score:2, Insightful)
Could not have happened to a more deserving fellow.
Ulteo copyright infringers? (Score:4, Interesting)
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:
If you read the Mozilla.org site licensing policies [mozilla.org], you'll see:
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)
I for one am sad (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://dollyknot.com/)
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)
(Last Journal: Monday November 06 2006, @09:08PM)
Underlaying issue is revenue (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Corporate market more and more? (Score:1)
"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.