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VA Lays Off Mesa Developer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the thats-not-very-cool dept.

j7953 writes: "Brian Paul, the author of Mesa, was laid off by VA Linux. Here's his mail to the mesa3d-dev list." Other places are reporting that Keith Whitwell of the DRI project was also laid off. Presumably just two of many major contributors to open source, but honestly I don't really know who got the axe. So far Slashdot has been unaffected by the layoffs (VA owns Slashdot too in case you live in a box).

10 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Why doesn't Slashdot get out of OSDN? by psicE · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Once you leave, it'll start a vicious cycle. Less people will advertise on OSDN because of the smaller userbase, and more sites will leave OSDN because they make no profit from it, until OSDN collapses and VA Linux is nothing but yet another proprietary software dot-bomb.

  2. Layoffs are tough by smoondog · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Layoffs are obviously tough, I feel bad for those who are losing their jobs in the tech industry. The author of MESA will probably have no problem finding another job. In the long term, though, I worry about the effects on open source development when worker/developers are laid off. I think we need to figure out ways to make open source more sustainable for those who develop projects so layoffs won't cut off important projects. Obviously MESA isn't going anywhere but other projects might be difficult to continue without the support of a company.

    -Sean

  3. DRI team is no longer at VA by Allen+Akin · · Score: 5, Insightful
    As far as I know, none of us who were working on open-source 3D graphics at VA are still with the company. There was a trickle of departures (Jens Owen, Frank LaMonica, Gareth Hughes, et al.) over the past six months. The rest of us were laid off along with the Professional Services group of which we were a part.

    There are a few projects underway, but at present no one knows whether those will be handled by contracts with individuals or whether some portion of the group will be hired by another company.

  4. Precision Insight and DRI by Amon+Re · · Score: 3, Insightful

    PI would have probably been better off if VA Linux did not buy them out. They used to receive funding from other opensource companies like Redhat and Suse, but all that stopped when VA Linux bought them. Now it seems that one of the most important and hardest to work on opensource projects out their is doomed. 3D drivers are already complicated enough when you are paid to do the work fulltime and are nearly impossible to do with only spare minutes during the day. DRI is going to need a company to back it to get any useful drivers or a better solution would be for video card companies to write there own opensource dri drivers.

  5. Don't forget Sourceforget.net by heroine · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The fact that VA I.O.U. laid off the last vestige of their engineers is sad, but you didn't need to be a prophet to know that was going to happen long before fuckedcompany.com reported it 2 weeks ago.

    I'm pretty sure if VA I.O.U. focused more on producing productivity software instead of library tweeking, infrastructure tools, and studies in basic computer science, they could have made money. There's only so much you can do with a cluster manager, but there's a lot you can do with a program that runs on the cluster.

    Unfortunately VA I.O.U.'s business scope was far to constrained by the personal experience of the board of directors, who were primarily basic computer scientists and not interested in options unrelated to their personal experience.

    Where it's really going to hit hard is in the decline of sourceforget.net. They pushed so hard to get everyone off the many free software portals of 1999 that when sourceforget.net eventually founders it's going to wipe out most of what we know as open source projects.

    They've already eliminated ftp servers, most shell services, and they're pretty much reading off the handbook of service eliminations that every other open source portal took last year before it shut down.

    1. Re:Don't forget Sourceforget.net by steveha · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Where it's really going to hit hard is in the decline of sourceforget.net. They pushed so hard to get everyone off the many free software portals of 1999 that when sourceforget.net eventually founders it's going to wipe out most of what we know as open source projects.

      No, no, no!

      If SourceForge founders, then a bunch of people have to move their code base somewhere else. That's it. No problem.

      If SourceForge were to suddenly founder overnight, with no warning whatsoever, there would be various degrees of inconvenience all around, depending on how careful people have been about keeping their own copies of stuff. I suspect most active developers will have complete copies of everything on their hard disks at all times, so they would have no problem. And at least a few people will keep tarballs around of the source to the other programs, even if they aren't in active development.

      I suppose if a few really obscure programs had no active development at all, and further that no one who uses them had a copy of the sources, that the source could be lost for those programs. But I don't think even this will happen. I'll bet you an ice cream it won't.

      steveha

      --
      lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
  6. NASDAQ delistings by sheldon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If a company stock trades at below $1 for a some period(I thought it was 30 days?), they are delisted from NASDAQ. There's more to this rule than that, I think there is also a $50 million market capitalization and maybe some other stuff.

    VA Linux is on the verge of this. It's stock has been freefalling for quite some time and is now hover right around $1 with market cap of around $59 million.

    Redhat is doing fine, they are still up around $3 with market cap over $500 million.

    Caldera on the other hand is probably going to be delisted here shortly. They've been below $1 for almost two months now, currently at 39 cents with market cap of just under $30 mil.

    Stocks trading under $5 are generally considered high risk and few investors will touch them.

    But being delisted from the exchange is a sign that the vultures are circling. Companies almost never recover from that position.

    It's a sign of the times I guess. A lot of these companies in the 90's should never have gone public. Instead focussed on growing their business up and out the old fashioned way, one small step at a time.

    1. Re:NASDAQ delistings by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      "It's a sign of the times I guess. A lot of these companies in the 90's should never have gone public. Instead focussed on growing their business up and out the old fashioned way, one small step at a time."

      Once you've taken money from VCs, this becomes impossible. You're obligated to drive for an IPO as quickly as possible, so your investors can cash out. They didn't give a fuck about you building a profitable business, they just wanted to cash in on the pyramid scheme that was the late 90's internet bubble as often as possible.

      Hopefully the collapse of the bubble will make the startup environment more like it used to be.

  7. Re:3d for GNU/Linux dead? by Allen+Akin · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Think about some of the changes going on in the industry right now:
    • New PC standards are for systems that are much less open than we've enjoyed in the past. Partly this is due to increasing demands for content protection. Partly this is due to a desire to reduce support costs. There are other reasons as well, but the bottom line is that the open-architecture PC as we knew it may be going out of style.
    • The high-volume platforms for 3D these days are proprietary entertainment systems (games consoles, perhaps eventually set-tops, and their descendants with better integrated A/V functionality). At this stage in the development of the market, vendors have tremendous incentives to protect their intellectual property and try to lock-in as many customers as possible.
    • Hardware vendors are collapsing. Microsoft's business model, in which they control the functionality that vendors can provide, reduces the opportunity to differentiate products and drives hardware profit margin down. As a result, a few mistakes are enough to take a vendor out of the game. There's less risk-taking by the vendors who don't enjoy comfortable leads in the market, and much less incentive for a vendor to do anything that would put its relationship with Microsoft at risk.
    • Conglomerates are acquiring control over the entire entertainment development and delivery process. Companies like Sony and AOL/TW intend to own characters, plots, production houses, news/information organizations, delivery channels, and platforms. (Microsoft has already taken the first steps toward doing the same.)

    One of the implications is that our old way of thinking about how graphics is delivered, supported, and used is becoming irrelevant (or at least relevant only to the smaller submarkets like engineering and sci vis). Is 3D graphics support for free systems meaningful when the market offers only proprietary systems?

    Just a larger context in which to think about the subject...

  8. Re:Why should anyone care? Please, tell me. by malducin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Just because the majority of readers think that Mesa/DRI is only useful for games, that doesn't mean it's not crucial for several other markets. One of the would be in engineering and scientific visualization. Remember that it's becoming more often for huge Linux clusters to be used in big data crunching applications. But after all the data is processed you want to be able to visualize: how air moves on a new wing design or turbine, a 3D volume visualization of the brain, meteorological patterns, stellar formation, how a car would react on a crash, etc. It would certainly be better for some people if they mantained the whole process under one platform.

    The other one is Digital Content Creation (DCC). The most recent example has been the production of Shrek. Though most of the Linux use in DCC and particularly FX have been in renderfarms (which don't require interactive OpenGL accelarated graphics), there is an increased use of Linux as animation workstations. PDI is making the switch, and also their co-workers at Dreamworks feature animation. Many other facilities are doing the switch to use Linux for interactive workstations: Pixar (their next movie Little Nemo will use Linux), ILM (by October they move 20% of their workstations, and 20% of their renderfarm to Linux, and the next movie after Episode 2 will mostly be done under Linux), Double Negative and many others. In October there is going to be a meeting organized by VES to discuss more of the FX technology and Linux. And of course several vendors already or are planning ports of their products to Linux: Maya 4 from Alias/Wavefront, Softimage 3D and XSI by Softimage, Houdini from SideFX already out, Rayz from Silicon Grail and several others.

    I guess it depends if you prefer a closed source but vendor supported solution. In oprder for Houdini to be released it was only available from HP workstation with their FX10 cards and they even provided their own X and OpenGL implementation (no XFree or Mesa/DRI). But I'm sure other customers or vendors might prefer an open solution.

    Just check the september issue of CGW for the Linux coverage in Hollywood. The current and past issue of LinuxJournal also have some coverage.

    CGW next issue
    Linux use in Dreamworks and PDI (LinuxJournal)