Submitted by “Duval details his side of the story: “Fired. Yes. Simply fired, for economical reasons, along with a few other ones. More than 7 years after I created Mandrake-Linux and then Mandrakesoft, the current boss of Mandriva ‘thanks me’ and I’m leaving, sad, with my two-month salary indemnity standard package. It’s difficult to accept that back in 1998 I created my job and the one of many other people, and that recently, on a February afternoon, Mandriva’s CEO called to tell me that I was leaving.” Mandriva’s CEO replies: “Gael was not fired. This term would imply something wrong on his part, which was not the case. He was laid off.”
Thats just wrong. I’m surprised its even possible.
Take a look at Steve Jobs. Maybe some day Duval will be back and in charge once again… Never say never.
I hope he doesn’t ever go back. I hope his new project takes off, and he doesn’t look back. Screw Mandriva.
It’s possible when a company goes public, and that’s why the owner should always hang on to more than 50% of the stock.
It’s possible when a company goes public, and that’s why the owner should always hang on to more than 50% of the stock.
Unless you’re google, it’s difficult to generate as much shareholder interest in non-voting shares or in a minority position. So you maintain control at the cost of capital raised. Investors want a say in how their money is spent.
Besides, 51% is quite a bit. Most founders can usually manage to maitain control of the company with as little as 5-10% stake, provided they don’t seriously fsck up.
Out of ALL THE PEOPLE you could have laid off at Mandriva what made laying HIM off in the best interests of the company and it’s investors ?!?!?!?
What is Mandriva now ? Us, the users, ask ourselves the same question.
Out of ALL THE PEOPLE you could have laid off at Mandriva what made laying HIM off in the best interests of the company and it’s investors ?!?!?!?
They didn’t say.
maybe he was a pain within mandriva.
Duval was the main man along others keeping up community relations. It’s so sad to see him go, but anyway, with his abilities I foresee and hope he’s gonna get into a nice project very soon. I and many others started our linux life with Mandrake and I think we own Duval many things in this regard.
Yeah good luck to Gael, Mandrake was my distro of choice up until recently, now it seems the man who gave us such a great OS has been chopped, its a shame, Mandriva CEO, i hope you get what you want because this looks like a mistake to me, sacking the man who created the company, what a cheek, Gael, join Ubuntu im sure they will find a job for you there 🙂
Well, being laid off is being fired in many peoples’ book.
The expenses cuts were done in a way we estimate will not keep us from generating revenue.
Errr. When you lay off employees you attempt to cut costs, not generate revenue. I’m sure lots of companies would love to generate more revenue whilst firing most of their workers, but alas, it is not possible.
Everyone works very hard at Mandriva and fulfills a useful task. So, when you have to cut, it means you need to cut people who were doing a good job and a useful one, so it is painful for everyone, but you have to make the hard choice.
Wow. Great thinking Batman! Does this mean that the useful people are all fired and the lazy people kept on, or is everyone useful at Mandriva?
I think we can reasonably expect Mandriva’s slide from here on in. Although the communication and open source community communication side of things may look as if it is something you can cut, for a distribution like Mandriva their userbase is a direct root into producing revenue. It’s a delicate balance, one I wouldn’t expect a heavy handed CEO to understand and one I completely agree with Gael on:
“I don’t know where the company is going. My feeling is that they are focusing more and more on the corporate market. Mandriva is more and more looking like a standard company, which is trying to sell services to fortune 500 companies, abandoning its initial roots. But at the same time, it’s keeping on releasing geeks products. This sounds like a fuzzy strategy, made from, in my opinion, the concatenation of current opportunities.”
The corporate market is good, but everything extends from what Gael is talking about. If Mandriva loses that then they lose their revenue and any platform they have for doing anything corporate.
Well, being laid off is being fired in many peoples’ book.
I completely agree. Having been on the receiving end of a down-sizing, it didn’t feel much different than being fired, and I was just an intern…
“Gael was not fired. This term would imply something wrong on his part, which was not the case. He was laid off.”
It seems that he’s either backpedaling hard or just socially challenged. If you lay off the founder of the company, you’re not just cutting cost; you make a statement. That statement, in my opinion, is pretty clear; it says that they either found Gael incompetent or that there were political reasons.
All just my opinions, of course.
“Gael was not fired. This term would imply something wrong on his part, which was not the case. He was laid off.”
It seems that he’s either backpedaling hard or just socially challenged.
No, he’s just being accurate.
You get fired for giving your boss the finger, disrupting workflow with disparaging comments, calling in “sick” too often, doing poor quality work, etc. Lay offs come for reasons that are not detracting to the individual, such as disagreements with company direction.
That’s why there are differences in the US for benefits (as another poster mentioned). It’s also why one is a black mark on your resume while the other is not.
It used to be that lay-offs were done simply according to seniority. Eventually someone woke up and realized that seniority did not necessarily guarantee utility to a company trying to earn money in a changing market. Nowadays you’d need a union to burden a company with that.
To be fair, IIRC companies sometimes lay off workers when it would be far too expensive or time-consuming (legally) to fire them. That mostly just applies to human debris – the sort who will do terrible work and then try to sue the employer for discrimination when fired – not to someone like Gael.
If you lay off the founder of the company, you’re not just cutting cost; you make a statement. That statement, in my opinion, is pretty clear; it says that they either found Gael incompetent or that there were political reasons.
Not necessarily. If they wanted to make a statement, this would have been a good time to do it. Right now people are just arguing about whether the company is about to be run into the ground by these mysterious management entities called “suits” or getting rid of old thinking that was holding the company back. Only time will tell.
Do you actually _read_?
You quote a paragraph containing this line:
“Everyone works very hard at Mandriva and fulfills a useful task.”
And then you say this:
“or is everyone useful at Mandriva?”
I’m speechless.
This sounds like the old Apple story, when Steve Jobs got fired as well. Mandriva will go down the same way, thats for sure. You don’t – as a matter of principle – fire the founder of the company! That is just plain bad business! Good luck Gael!
Actually it is very common and good thing to fire the founder of a company, happens all the time. Usually it is because the company has become enormously successful and the qualities of the founder are not in line with running of large companies, but Mandriva never fit that model. The other reason for firing is sinple, the company isn’t going anywhere anyway and who ever brings in the money gets to set the direction. Many people a have a prefererence for certain stages of company development, early, middle, late, huge. Few can transition across all phases, different job each stage.
Anyway I am sure Gael will bounce back, layoffs can actually be a source of inspiration. It looks like he saw it coming a year ago by spending time on his Ulteo project, that alone is reason to be selected to go do something fresh.
As for Steve J, look what his firing produced, NeXT, and then turnaround OS X, that wouldn’t have happened if he had stayed at Apple through the 90s. Getting fired is like taking a breadth of fresh air after you get past the sting.
His next project Ulteo sounds interesting. But is there any info on it? Google didn’t help.
http://www.ulteo.com/
I don’t know where the company is going.
This is distressing. I think I started with Mandrake 8.2 after trying but going nowhere with three attempts with RedHat. I hope Mandriva remains a good product.
I don’t know this 100%, but from what I understand, Mr. Duval was asked to leave (quit) early last year by the CEO. He refused, so he was moved to a very non-essential role as head of community relations. As an indicator of where Mandriva is headed, the board axed the community relations division and along with it, Mr. Duval.
It’s obvious the head of Mandriva is a suit. Mandriva’s success has been in the SOHO/homeuser, but their focus otherwise, the obvious drop in quality since 8.2, and the bad PR from firing Mr. Duval, I feel, will kill a lot of Mandriva’s momentum and they will slip way down the list of major Linux distros.
Is Eugenia’s posting role being minimized? I usually like her perspective (even when I disagree with her)? The reason I ask is that when NewsForge interviewed Gael about this two days ago, I know Eugenia was aware of it as she posted a comment directly on the article explaining why she thought it might not be in Gael’s best interest to sue Mandriva. You can find the NewsForge article with Eugenia’s comment here:
http://trends.newsforge.com/trends/06/03/15/208240.shtml?tid=138&ti…
Beyond that, I would like to agree with everyone else that it is usually a bad business decision to fire your company’s founder.
Is Eugenia’s posting role being minimized?
Eugenia stepped down ages ago, I’m her successor.
http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=11011
Wow, I’ve been ‘managing editor’ 9 months already? Damn :/.
I always find it amusing when executives say things like: “you weren’t fired, you were laid off”. I’ve been laid off before, and I found it interesting that all the high-salary employees were kept, while the “worker bees” were let go.
Really…! I don’t work in the computer industry but that has to be the sure sign of a dying company. Workers are the people who make the world go around, everyone else is dead weight.
My company (in an unrelated industry) would, without a doubt, “lay off” managers, supervisors, sales staff long before any of the people on the production floor.
It was funny…they said they did it to cut costs, but they kept the highest-paid employees. Just milking out a few more paychecks, I guess.
And you know how much everyone at Mandriva is paid (and, for that matter, you know who else was laid off – there were 20 people, can you name them all?)? Wow, this thread really _is_ full of Nostradamuses.
Actually, I was talking about the company I got laid off from, not Mandriva. It probably would help if you would *read* the comment I wrote in the first place before posting.
Really…! I don’t work in the computer industry but that has to be the sure sign of a dying company. Workers are the people who make the world go around, everyone else is dead weight.
My company (in an unrelated industry) would, without a doubt, “lay off” managers, supervisors, sales staff long before any of the people on the production floor.
Meh, reminds me of SUN and the incompentant half witts who sit in management; dare god, if it isn’t people with charisma of a law mower trying to hype a new product, its the marketing department with crap sense of humour, trying to take a jab at Dell with their ‘rejected ideas’.
Some days, I wonder whether we should have public floggings for executives who should never have been in their position, let alone allowed to be born in the first place!
Yeah, it usually isn’t a good idea to lay off the charismatic creator of the company. It’s also a bad job to cut the community relations department of an Open Source project (after all, what’s the best way to gain mindshare in OSS?). But hey, it’s way too early to tell if this is a bad decision. Do any of the nay-sayers here work at Mandriva?
That said, with this news and their slipping QC, my money’s on Mandriva turning in to a litigious company before tanking ;-/ But hey, I could well be wrong.
No doubt that firing Gael will lead to badwill for Mandriva.
On the other side keeping a former charismatic leader of a company is not always a good idea. Especially not if you need to take the company into a new direction. Given Mandrake/Mandrivas history of financial problems & quality issues something has to happen.
Old elephants are usually strong, have a great memory and are restistant to change – but thats not always a good thing. Everybody who has experienced an old manager staying to long in a company will know this.
And in the end, we don´t really know what happened….
Edited 2006-03-17 14:52
I can give an amen to that post.
From the former employee’s perspective, the difference between being fired and being laid off (in the US) is that when you’re laid off you can apply for unemployment benefits.
It sounds pretty weird that Gael is going to sue his former employer. Maybe Gael got himself into this mess when he decided to make Mandrake a publicly traded company instead of being privately owned by himself? I don’t know the history of Mandrake here, but in the States, when you IPO (“go public”), that’s usually the point at which the executives make wads of dough and the company starts its downward spiral.
I’m pretty sure you get unemployment when getting fired. The difference is the exit package that you get when being laid off (if there is one..).
The difference is the exit package that you get when being laid off (if there is one..).
He got the French legal minimum of two months pay.
MANDRIBBLE for him!
Seriously though, this bites. This is exactly why you don’t stick around at a company you start after you sell your soul to the bankers. DUH.
What, did he think he’d work there forever, just because he started the place? HAhahaha. You bring in bankers, you’re all slaves to money, nothing more than a warm body with a skillset. If that skillset dosen’t seem to make money to the banker, they’ll send you away.
Welcome to capitalism, Gael.
STUPID management that doesn’t understand the basis of their company…
HP fired William Hewlett and hired Fiorna (sp?), who was apparently a real nasty person to work with. HP’s shares and image dropped, so they finally let her go.
Apple fired Steve Jobs, and after almost going bankrupt and disappearing off the face of the Earth – hired him back (which saved the company)
In short, if you’re just a “suit” that got put in place for your “management skills” – you need to remember something. YOU DON”T KNOW SQUAT!!!
I’ve had two bosses in the past that micromanaged the life out of us employees, and I’m (VERY) happy to say that they got what they deserved. I left both positions and came to visit them later, only to discover that everything had gone down the tubes. Business people don’t know the first thing about computer technology OR the world’s user-base. All they know or see is dollar signs, and not the underlying skills of their people – and in the case of the Linux world, businessmen are practially irrelevant.
I respect Gael Duvall’s work and hope that Mandrake/Mandriva rightfully drops off the planet. I have no malice of intent to the programmers there, they are the ONLY ones that can save it – but until their managers get the hint from the outside world (which I think they eventually will) they deserve to completely LOSE the company they DIDN”T CREATE.
God speed Gael!! I wish you, your wife, and daughter happier days ahead – and in the future, don’t let “suits” think they know ANYTHING… …they don’t!
I’ve had two bosses in the past that micromanaged the life out of us employees, and I’m (VERY) happy to say that they got what they deserved. I left both positions and came to visit them later, only to discover that everything had gone down the tubes. Business people don’t know the first thing about computer technology OR the world’s user-base. All they know or see is dollar signs, and not the underlying skills of their people – and in the case of the Linux world, businessmen are practially irrelevant.
Sounds like a re-run of my life; last job I left just over 9 months ago, we were the fastest growing shop, and my department had the highest margins, highest profit growth and highest departmental percentage for a store in New Zealand – I left because I couldn’t stand my boss; low and behold, I left, 2 employees have gone throw that spot, profit has gone down, so has margins; for me, I have no sympathy, I just hope that one day that the bosses excessive smoking and drinking knocks him off quickly.
The problem isn’t with management, but management unwilling to sit down, shut up and listen to those in the know; and worse still the problem is perpetuated when you have management who think they know more than they truely do – know your limitations, and if you do need to seek advice, DO SO.
Woz from Apple KNOWS he would be a crap manager, as he said, he an engineer, he leaves the wizz bang show man ship up to Steve Jobs; both have their rolls in their organisation – no one man or women (if one needs to feel PC) can do ‘it all’.
As for Fiorna; she was a clueless idiot promoted into a position that she was illl capable of doing; it was more a sad attempt of appearing PC – ‘oh, look at us, we have a female CEO!’ rather than appointing someone who needed to pull of a merger that was complex, complicated and filled with issues.
The problem with HP, they have no solid direction; they have no integrated, company wide stratergy which ALL their products can couple into – its more ‘here is some crap, here is some services and blah” – sorry, if customers wanted that, they can easily go to Dell, and order a fleet of 10,000 corporate PC’s at a lower cost and same quality than purchasing it off HP.
.. took a few years to settle his portion of the company but I don’t think the guy will ever get over it completely.
I don’t know anything about the whole firing/laying off thing and people generally seem to have a very high opinion of him but stuff like this is just ridiculous:
So it’s the end of the Mandrake/Mandriva venture for me. I’m just going to sue Mandriva for abusive lay-off, since I doubt that the real reason was economical for me. I have the very bad feeling that my initial project has been wasted and this sentiment is reinforced since I have alerted my president twice in 2005 about the bad trend in the management and business.
So, what the heck, he’s just gonna sue them because he thinks they might be lying about something that isn’t really his business in the end? It’s kind of inconsequential, since he’s starting something up on his own again, but if I was in a position to consider hiring him at some other company, such flippant litigation would be a huge reason not to take him on.
If he had any actual loyalty to the company I can’t see why he wouldn’t just shake his head and let them do what they think they need to do.
If he had any actual loyalty to the company I can’t see why he wouldn’t just shake his head and let them do what they think they need to do.
…probably because they had no loyalty to him. I don’t know all the details or reasons for what happened either – but I don’t fault him for the lawsuit, it’s his right to file what he feels is right. And after his comments about the CEO’s personal dislike of him, one can only assume that everything’s not in the open.
Regarding the new start-up he’s founding, that has nothing to do with Mandrake. He still needs a paycheck after his ‘severance pay’ is over – it may be a bit ‘childish’, but getting stabbed in the back tends to make people respond.. how should I say?…. unhappily? We’re all a little childish, that’s our ‘inner child’ feeling bullied. And everyone should agree that bullies are rotten people…
I agree with most people here. For people who have been around for awhile, Mandrake was once “THE” linux distro for users..For a long time it was about the only distro you could actually get to work because it was community oriented and driven, much liek Ubuntu of today…It is just simply poor posture to fire,layoff,dismmis, however you want to twist it, a founder and community activist for any community driven product…no matter how unessential you think the Founder may be…you don’t fire the guy…for some time now, it had seemed that Mandriva had lost its way, and was wandering around in limbo trying to figure out its place in the community/marketplace…this is just further confirmation that those sentiments were not unfounded. People move on…no big deal, heck the Gentoo Founder left and most people sympathized with him and wished him the best at MS…but he wasnt FIRED/LAID OFF…big dif…Sad to say, buy if this is the direction they are headed…this may mark the beginning of the end for Mandriva as a powerhouse in the community…no matter how you shack you business swagger…linux is about the community…sure money makes a difference…but with no community backing, you are doomed to fail…this will leave a seriously bad taste in the long time supporter of mandriva in the community…and not because its not doing so well with releases…but on principle and principle alone…With distros Ubuntu and OpenSUSE gaining momentum at an exponential rate…Fedora runnin g strong…now is not the time to pick fights with the community..thanks for the ride Gael…and somone stick a fork in Mandriva…i think they may be done…
>this may mark the beginning of the end for Mandriva as a powerhouse in the community
Hmm – even as a forty-somethind cynic, I still get amazed about how the ‘open source community’ regards companies and projects with awe and respect when they are basket cases tottering from insolvancy protection to a desperate half-life based on past glories, with no market share, or even a realistic chance of ever having one, or with crippling venture repayments looming, etc etc. A triumph for style over substance.
Seriously, if you want to have people working full time developing Linux, or doing the legwork trying to break into datacentre accounts, then you have to get used to *paying* for product and support, so that they can draw a salary commensurate with their ability.
The heck with community, it doesn’t pay the bills.
The linux market is a tad precarious for small players. I suspect that Mr Shuttleworth’s largesse will effectively hasten a shakeout. Whether he will continue to dip into his own pocket when Canonical is supposed to suddenly monetise the customers it has educated to expect free as in beer, will be interesting to see.
It will also be interesting to see Red Hat squeezed by Canonical and Novell on one side (not to mention the free rebuilds like CentOs) and Sun on the other. Interesting times ahead.
(I’m ‘assuming’ that Novell can remake themselves from a big company on the back of NetWare to a rather smaller company on the back of Linux without actually running out of cash, but its by no means certain, is it?)
“It will also be interesting to see Red Hat squeezed by Canonical and Novell on one side (not to mention the free rebuilds like CentOs) and Sun on the other. Interesting times ahead.”
I don’t think things have been changing. Throughout the history of Linux, there have been many small players coming and going, but there have always been the big three that have controlled the majority of the market: Red Hat, SuSE, and Debian. The small players have gone and have left their mark in the evolution of Linux. Having three companies is very healthy because it allows for lots of competition, choice, and no vendor lock-in while allowing them to make a healthy profit and grow. Also the fact that the code is open-source will always make sure that none of the big three will be knocked out since they will be able to adopt the technology and get back into the ring.
This is the situation with the Linux landscape right now. Red Hat is firing on all cylinders. They just can’t seem to do anything wrong at the moment. RHEL is healthy and experiencing dramatic growth. Fedora is building a rock-solid community and is the leader in stability and new technology. Furtheremore, they have chosen a rock-solid technology path to keep their OS running full steam ahead (Ext3, SELinux, GCJ, etc.)
SuSE is way out of sync. They have blown a lot of money in investing in dead-end projects (AppArmor, GLX, YAST, Mono) trying to differentiate themselves. They have major stability issues with these technologies because they are the only ones that want them. The truth is that the market doesn’t want this. The market wants different distributions but that use the same basic foundation. SuSE needs to drop those projects and go back with standard Linux solutions and differentiate themselves on these.
Debian, like SuSE, is also a little out of sync. The mere existence of Ubuntu suggests that the Debian community is not happy with the Debian project’s ability to adapt. Debian needs to: 1) drop a lot of useless architecture support, 2) develop a timeline for “Enterprise” releases and normal releases, 3) develop a support timeline for these releases, 4) spend more time on optimizing the core and less time on the countless packages. Ubuntu is a result of the Debian project ignoring it’s users. Ubuntu will disappear the second the Debian people get their act together. Regardless of what happens, either Debian will remain Debian, or Ubuntu will become the new Debian but with a different name.
I believe these three distributions are here to stay. They will overcome Sun and end up sharing the market with Microsoft. In the meantime, a lot of small Linux projects will come to scratch an itch, to provide entertainment, and then disappear.
“SuSE is way out of sync. They have blown a lot of money in investing in dead-end projects (AppArmor, GLX, YAST, Mono) trying to differentiate themselves. They have major stability issues with these technologies because they are the only ones that want them. The truth is that the market doesn’t want this. The market wants different distributions but that use the same basic foundation. SuSE needs to drop those projects and go back with standard Linux solutions and differentiate themselves on these.”
We are going offtopic here, but I want to express my opinion nonetheless.
YaST is the most essential part of SUSE, and it has been defined by many as one of the best setup and configuration tool of any OS. A direct derivative of YaST is the repair feature that you can run from the first CD/DVD and which will rescue a badly broken system in 95% of cases, with little need to know the inner workings of linux.
AppArmor is one of the best security tools ever created: have you tried it?
As to Xgl, it might not be needed by everybody, but it is a very good proof of concept that linux can be as good as (or better than) other operating systems when it comes to eye candy.
I don’t want to get off topic either. My original post was regarding someone stating that the death/dying of Mandr/ake/iva is evidence of Linux failing. I was just countering and stating that there have been many deaths but the big three have always been very strong contenders. The fact that I have labelled SuSE as part of the big three distros means I certainly have respect for it. That being said, I definitely believe they are going in the wrong direction.
First of all, regarding YAST. YAST is a big, clunky buggy monster of a program. It reminds me of Linuxconf back in the days. YAST usefullness is also now quickly being replaced by smaller, more specific apps that are being integrated into Gnome, programs that Ubuntu, RedHat, and many other projects are very happy about and that are pushing hard for them.
Secondly, AppArmor. While AppArmor might be easier to manage than SELinux at the moment, it is also far more inferior. It is almost something that Microsoft would come up with so that they can check it off their check list. SuSE is the only distro that is pushing hard for it. On the other hand, the Linux community has chosen SELinux because while it may be harder, it is the right way of doing things. Unix has always been about doing things once by doing things right. Like YAST, AppArmor is doing things wrong and will be just another dead end.
Finally, XGL is the same tune as everything that SuSE has touched recently. In the long run, AIGLX will be the dominant technology because it has been designed correctly. Again, it fits with the way Unix does things (the right way.) XGL on the otherhand is just a check mark box that SuSE can check but that introduces a lot of problems that AIGLX elegantly solves. XGL will continue to be very unstable and difficult to integrate, while AIGLX will slowly gain more and more features and surpass XGL.
I can go on and on to prove my point: SuSE is on the wrong path and needs to come back to the open source community and push solutions that were developed by the open source community. This is apparent by their current attempt to release SuSE 10.1. They have now released 8 betas and they are still very problematic. When they join the open source community, they will cut their costs dramatically, help open source projects advance much faster, and increase the viability of SuSE in the enterprise.
“…SuSE is on the wrong path and needs to come back to the open source community and push solutions that were developed by the open source community.”
“When they join the open source community…”
Funny, everybody else seems to believe that they are good members of the open source community and that they contribute with code.
“This is apparent by their current attempt to release SuSE 10.1. They have now released 8 betas and they are still very problematic.”
The reason is well known: they introduced changes to the package manager in the middle of beta testing. This might have not been the wisest thing to do, but it doesn’t mean that the final won’t be stable enough.
See this post:
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=14003&comment_id=105258
RE: the Xgl/Aiglx debate, see:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/Feb-23-1.html
Edited 2006-03-17 23:04
Stop talking nonsense, will you.
Your arguments are pathetically devoid of reason,insight or anything that may look like a thought coming out of your skull.
Suse’s development has been opened. Yast has a wonderful ncurses interface that can be utilized even over a slow modem link. It is consistent and reliable.
The people like you who need to demonize other projects to boost their pet projects do immense harm to the spirit of collaboration that is at the heart of open source.
Finally, XGL is the same tune as everything that SuSE has touched recently. In the long run, AIGLX will be the dominant technology because it has been designed correctly. Again, it fits with the way Unix does things (the right way.) XGL on the otherhand is just a check mark box that SuSE can check but that introduces a lot of problems that AIGLX elegantly solves. XGL will continue to be very unstable and difficult to integrate, while AIGLX will slowly gain more and more features and surpass XGL.
AIGLX has it a lot of problems. AIGLX is really only going to work well on Nvidia cards. XGL should work equally as well on ATI and Intel chipsets. That’s going to be a big problem for people who do not own Nvidia cards. Despite what you believe AIGLX doesn’t “elegantly” solve all of XGL’s problems. It most certainly introduces some of its own problems.
hroughout the history of Linux, there have been many small players coming and going, but there have always been the big three that have controlled the majority of the market: Red Hat, SuSE, and Debian. The small players have gone and have left their mark in the evolution of Linux. Having three companies is very healthy because it allows for lots of competition, choice, and no vendor lock-in while allowing them to make a healthy profit and grow.
When did Debian become a company? That’s news to me. Redhat and Suse are the two big Linux companies and have been for a long time. Debian has been a big community supported distro for a long time but it isn’t a commercial distribution and never was.
Fedora is building a rock-solid community and is the leader in stability and new technology. Furtheremore, they have chosen a rock-solid technology path to keep their OS running full steam ahead (Ext3, SELinux, GCJ, etc.)
Are you really claiming that Fedora is the leader in stability? Fedora is nice, but it IS experimental, which means, “not very stable”.
SuSE is way out of sync. They have blown a lot of money in investing in dead-end projects (AppArmor, GLX, YAST, Mono) trying to differentiate themselves. They have major stability issues with these technologies because they are the only ones that want them.
Now you are going way off the deep end. How exactly are any of those technologies unstable? I have yet to try XGL but according to testers, it is more stable and works better than AIGLX, which Redhat has released. As for AppArmour vs SELinux, I have also yet to see any issues with stability concerning AppArmour. SELinux is a great technology but it is not the only way and in fact is only a small step in a totally secure system. Then somehow you drag YaST into this which is just plain stupid considering it is hands down the best configuration tool for Linux.
Mono vs GCJ is a whole other issue. I used to favor GCJ/GNU Classpath over Mono based solutions but that has changed. While Mono/.NET is a much newer technology it works a lot better for me. Java is buggy as hell on my system. After closing a java program the JVM continues to eat all my memory until I kill it. The mono programs I use are much faster, more stable, and native looking. I still hope to have a full free Java implementation but that’s only because OpenOffice, Azureus, and Eclipse use Java.
But instead of first posting here about my disgust, I spoke with my wallet.
Cancelled my club membership with a note stating that this move is one of the most disrespectful and dirty things I’ve seen in the OSS world in a while.
I haven’t used Mandrake since the 8.x days, but have always renewed my club membership because it was the distro. that got my feet wet in the Linux world. I couldn’t watch this distribution die, I was happy when they started turning things around. But, now I couldn’t care less. I won’t pay into a system that treats their originators like that.
edit: typos
Edited 2006-03-17 16:59
I hope quite a few members follow your example. Not because I want to see Mandriva die, but because I believe the management deserves a lesson.
They have shown arrogance many times in the past, but this is really the last straw, IMO.
Fired = unplanned by the employee, no pay
Laidoff = unplanned by the employee, pay for a very short period of time
Not a huge difference, and in my eyes pretty much the same thing.
I agree with a post above; the Mandriva CEO is a suit. I never got into Mandrake/Mandriva, but I admired their efforts into making a unique distro.
Founders of companies don’t just get laid off. And if, by some chance, they do: They’re immediately rehired.
He’s right, he was fired.
Regardless of what happens to Mandriva, its code will never dissappear and can still be transformed by others in the community. For example, beginning with Mandrake/Mandriva 9.2 there was a fork by the famous/helpful Texstar called PCLinuxOS.
http://www.pclinuxos.com/
I wonder why Duval only has two months of income left off Mandriva before they cut him off. I think the whole of this is nothing more than legal theft. The guy who puts all his assets on the line to start a company from scratch in an already competitive market deserves to continue making his share of the profits from his original gamble. Instead the investors who know little to nothing of the hardship of starting such a company get the money and Duval gets the boot after all the work is done for the investors to profit from.
The CEO of Mandriva is Francois Bancilhon, who co-founded the company with Gael. Everyone seems to have this odd idea that we hired a bunch of bloodthirsty bank managers to staff the board somewhere in the middle of 2005, but it’s _really_ not true.
I’m not criticising his successor, I’m criticising the investors who are the CEO’s bosses. Duval shouldn’t have been let go with no indication of continuing compensation for his part in founding the company.
Francois is not his successor. Francois has been the CEO for many years. Gael has not been in one of the central management roles for many years (he was most recently head of the newly created Community department; before that he was head of Communications, basically the marketing department).
My bad then. I had the impression Duval was CEO up until around 2004 or 2005.
I thought Jacques Le Marois co-founded the company with Gael.
The CEO of Mandriva is Francois Bancilhon, who co-founded the company with Gael. Everyone seems to have this odd idea that we hired a bunch of bloodthirsty bank managers to staff the board somewhere in the middle of 2005, but it’s _really_ not true.
According to Mandriva’s own website – http://wwwnew.mandriva.com/en/company/about – your claim about Bancilhon is simply not true. In fact, the official company history referenced above says:
Mandriva was founded in 1998 by three young Linux enthusiasts: Jacques Le Marois, Gaël Duval and Frédéric Bastok.
According to http://wwwnew.mandriva.com/en/company/press/pr/corporate_2401 Bancilhon was at SomaLogic in Colarado until November 2002. To quote that press release:
After eighteen months of intensive restructuring, MandrakeSoft is showing extremely positive results: Revenue is up, while expenses have been drastically reduced. The company is now at the stage where it needs an experienced manager capable of taking it to the next level of development, while keeping the Open Source spirit which has always been one of MandrakeSoft’s main strengths.
This sounds like an outside appointee to me; whether he is “bloodthirsty” or not is a matter of opinion.
Edited 2006-03-18 01:47
oops, you’re quite right, i’m sorry – I was thinking of jacques (who’s president, now, so still in overall control).
“It seems that he’s either backpedaling hard or just socially challenged. If you lay off the founder of the company, you’re not just cutting cost; you make a statement. That statement, in my opinion, is pretty clear; it says that they either found Gael incompetent or that there were political reasons.”
Not really. Mandriva is not a gigantic company full of extraneous secretaries, bean counters and lawyers who could be kicked out without anyone noticing the difference (well, except them). We have around 150 staff, around half of whom are developers. If you sat down with the Mandriva org chart and had to pick 20 people to lay off, you’d find it a damn hard task too.
Mandriva was the distro which made me believe having linux on the desktop was possible, I am thankful to Mr Duval for this.
On the last years I have tried distros which got better and made me even more comfortable and contributor to the linux community.
Not knowing the real reason for the lay-off I can only think that whatever plans the CEO has for Mandriva he doesn’t find any value on Duval’s participation, so far so good, this is the usual risk for the creator which doesn’t care that much about controlling its creation, some people call it sharing.
Anyway no matter the reason the minimum expected respectful action for such lay-off from the CEO would be to issue a clear statement about it. Whether this was a François Bancilhon decision or not, the company/community which treats this way it’s founders does not deserve to survive.
At the end I hope Mr Duval get his Lessons Learned and I which him good luck for his new project, hopefully it will be the “next generation” Mandrake.
Well it looks like Mandriva may have made a mistake.
Kicking the founder of a company out on his ass just sits wrong with me, and I’m sure that it sits wrong with a lot of people.
Unfortunately it looks like Mandriva has just become yet another corporate bullshit company who are quite happy to stick a knife into someone’s back for an extra few bucks.
that’s what happens you give up control of your company.