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Mandriva Fires Founder Gael Duval, Who Plans to Sue 267

Posted by Roblimo 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 More

Mandriva Fires Founder Gael Duval, Who Plans to Sue

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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 ) <mark AT winckle DOT co DOT uk> 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.
    • "but I'm beginning to think Ubuntu has replaced Mandrake/riva as the No 1 user-friendly distro"

      s/Ubuntu/Kubutu/g since Mandrake defaulted to KDE.
    • I've been using Mandr* for probably 5 years now. I've looked at other things, but never really given them a fair shake. I'm thinking of trying it again. Should I look at Ubuntu or Kanotix? One thing I really like about Mandr* is the PLF packages that add MP3 playing/encoding, DVD playing, proprietary codecs for VLC etc. Is there something similar for one of these friendly Debian based distros?

    • 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

      • Re:This is truly a sad day (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Wylfing ( 144940 ) <brian @ w y lfing.net> on Wednesday March 15, 2006 @07:06PM (#14929074) Homepage Journal
        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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <[moc.liamg] [ta] [namtabmiaka]> on Wednesday March 15, 2006 @05:09PM (#14928093) Homepage Journal
      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
    • Mandrake was the first distro I ever managed to get working. Now I'm using Ubuntu on my desktop. As I see it, Ubuntu and Debian have the advantage of making it really easy and convenient to install software. Yeah, I know, because this is a Mandrive story, a gazillion Mandriva users will flame me, and say that RPM is just a file format, apt-get isn't really easier, etc. Well, all I can say is that apt-get seems easier to me.

      The disadvantages of Ubuntu, as I see them, are:

      1. It's a bleeding-edge distro. Ever
      • I tried to run mandrake. I put it on my brother's laptop etc, and it worked well for a few years. But, damnit, it's rpm and not .deb - what's with that? I too have switched to ubuntu, and the number one reason is because it uses .deb
    • 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

  • His own fault (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.
    • You're absolutely right. Anything else is an inefficiency, and bad for everyone.
    • 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.

        • I agree. The company is more than one person there are probably hundreds of people working there. As management it is your job to make sure that the people there continue to get paid. If one person is making it impossible(or harder) to do that then you're doing a disservice to those hundreds of other people by not letting that person go. If your options are Paying 501 people for a couple more months or paying 500 indefinately the decision is simple. That's more than likely a gross exageration of the sit
        • 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.

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

          Not in France, certainly not. You'll end up in court and having to prove that the person was doing something really wrong.
        • 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 ) on Wednesday March 15, 2006 @05:21PM (#14928217)
      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

        • Thank you! Thank you!!! I'm so tired of people who believe that the more government regulation there is, the closer the economy comes to some kind of workers' utopia. People don't understand that the balance of power CAN, in fact, tilt too far in favor of workers, and France is a prime example of what happens.

          There's a good reason why France has 10+ percent unemployment, and it's not because there isn't work to be done. Employers just won't risk hiring people because of business-hostile labor laws.

          And
      • "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."

        Well, you could do that, and look forward to many "last days".

        Or you could quit whining about "the system" and do good work. That way you wouldn't have to be looking over your shoulder every day.

    • Re:You gotta be kidding me. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What is happening to the right to fire?

      There's no such right. Before you criticise, consider this: do you have the right to fire a worker for not sucking you off in your country? No? Then your "right to fire" has limitations too. Whether you can legally fire somebody depends on the circumstances.

      The real question is why he was fired. If, as you wildly speculate, he was fired because it's more profitable for the company that way, then sure, they should be able to fire him. But you only have thei

    • 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.
      • Thanks for this post. It is unfortunate, I think, that so many folks today are so driven by bottom-line concerns that they lose sight of (or at least strongly deprioritize) many of the non-financial goals with which most businesses are started. Further--and I think this is more or less the point of the original post--it is a sad thing anytime someone who creates something from nothing is later told to leave by folks who come later. Perhaps this man had it coming based on performance issues--the company has
    • sole law of maximizing shareholder wealth for public companies

      Just a note - in the United States of America, corporations (public and private) owe their first duty to their shareholders. In parts of Europe, however, they owe their first duty to someone else - typically to the society as a whole.

    • 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.

  • 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 c
  • 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 s

  • 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.
    • and now, they have subscriber support only for some wifi cards.

      It is possible that Ubuntu recognized your wifi card out of the box and Mandriva didn't, but that certainly isn't because of "subscriber support only". All Free drivers are included with the download edition, proprietary stuff is either in the boxed set or available with a Mandriva Club membership.

  • 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

      • Thanks for the info! I noticed that the packages from the other CD's are indeed on public mirrors, which does indeed make ISO downloads a moot point, and the official X.org is working again. :)

        I had only seen the set of new Xorg packages that recently showed up with a priority of security. I took that as meaning I'd only get security fixes from those, and chosen the SoS security updates instead.

    • The Mandrake Club is what moved me back to Debian, too. Running the Ubuntu flaovr of Debian, these days, and not looking back :-)
    • The idea back then was that it was a voluntary donation with no extra benefits other than supporting continued development.

      This always interests me. Donate money to a for-profit entity in order to further its pursuit of profits? Why, exactly? I have donated to Wikipedia, for example, because I can see its budget and know that the money will go to where it's needed--hosting fees and equipment, for example. Why would I donate to Encyclopedia Britannica?

      Similarly, why would I donate to Mandriva, or to Cano

  • 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 )
    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.

  • 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 )
    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

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