Slashdot Mirror
VA Lays Off Mesa Developer
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).
FWIW, several former VA employees have told me that VA has laid off their entire Professional Services division, which includes all the graphics folks.
Right now they have still have a lot of cash and assets, tangible and intangible. OSDN, according to someone who responded to one of my posts and seemed to know what he's talking about, is turning a profit. (No idea how - the ThinkGeek ad I'm looking at now isn't making any money.) It's not scaring Microsoft, but it's plenty to make for an extremely well-funded startup. Come up with a new plan that you think is going to work, change the name and make a clean break. Right now, they're just circling the drain.
I'm not saying this is going to happen, but let's just say for the hell of it that VA goes under.
What would become of Slashdot? I would assume Slashdot would sink with the ship considering Slashdot is a part of VA, however, am I wrong? Is there a 'contingency plan' if this horrible event were to occur? I would think such a plan would be important with the understanding that many companies have recently come to a very abrupt end and creditors rush to hold assets (domain names, software, site content, (gasp) user infomation, etc), leaving the potential for rebirth or independent continuation of a site by a third party virtually impossible.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
So, seeing as Slashdot is part of VA...does slashdot itself turn a profit? I mean, i know there are a lot of users, and a lot of banner ads, but really...i'd like to know.
That said, layoffs are common anywhere, but they still suck ass.
VA Linux owns Slashdot and Thinkgeek, but also Sourceforge. Sourceforge is supposed to be a major source of profit.
But is it, really? Sure, Sourceforge is a wonderful framework for developpers and users.
But how many companies really *need* this instead of just installing a CVS server + a discussion board + a public FTP server?
Out of these companies, how many really will *buy* this? Especially since Sourceforge is also an Opensource project?
Not a lot IMHO. On the other hand, Slashdot and Sourceforge requires a lot of bandwidth and computers. Plus employees. That's expensive. Surely a lot much that incoming revenues.
So, will Sourceforge survive?
Sourceforge has already tons of unresolved bugs. All his mailing-lists are archived by Geocrawler that explicitely states that "Geocrawler is not longer being maintained" (check the "about" button in the home page) .
If VA fires unique people like Mesa's leader, is it also the beginning of the end of Sourceforge?
{{.sig}}
When I joined Andover.net they had just changed from selling software to making websites to puts ads on (slaughterhouse,mediabuilder, and andovernews). The strategy was to develop sites that would attract page hits that required very little actual day to day managing so the developers could go build other sites. To be honest I never understood how the news site could be 'worth it' since you had to pay someone everyday just to keep the page hits even. Well I came on board and my first major project was to make a bit Gifoptimizer then Gifwizard (since they had started charging for their service). I went on to write the backend code for Gifworks and the highly obnoxious 3dtextmaker. But then the day came to ramp up page hits by acquiring damn with the costs of actually maintaining it (gifworks and 3dtextmaker now happily chug away in a back closet somewhere with probably no one watching it.... about 3 million page hits a month whose only overhead is electricity and bandwidth).
Well we got Slashdot to bolster our page hits and Freshmeat soon followed too. Then we got bought by VA Linux. After a while they decided that OSDN(Andover.net) was costing alot of money to run so they axed everyone who wasn't involved in Slashdot or Freshmeat it seems. I still wonder what it costs to run Slashdot. I stil somewhat regret not taking the offer of working on the Slashdot database... although the days when something goes wrong I'm glad I didn't. It is amusing to see that VA Linux is not mostly what is left of Andover.net... although what is left of Andover.net seems to be primarily what we had acquired... a lot of the stuff we built before our spending spree seems forgotten or discarded. Somewhat depressing.... I have this fear if the sites I helped with ever crash... no one will turn them back on and they will fade into oblivion. Oh well just some random thoughts.
John Casey
Gif Spinner
Yes, and no. You lose the ability to have influence over the direction of development. For example to decide which graphics cards get worked on first/next.
If the developer gets a new job that isn't to keep working on the code, they will also (probably) work on it less. So if VA needed the code to keep evolving then they are at risk there too.
There is also the chance that the new employer either doesn't allow OSS work, or has such an interesting project that the developer gives up on the old project...
What potential revenue stream is VA sacrificing by laying off open-source developers of a UNIX related X graphics library? Is VA in the 3-D graphics business?
Even from a Linux user standpoint, what Linux application will suffer from a lack of Mesa/DRI drivers?
Hey, its sad when someone's ("Holy Grail") quest is thwarted. But these developers will find jobs; just not doing the quest they dedicated themselves.
So VA pays a few less salaries, and hopefully those measures allow it to be financially viable enough to keep Slashdot and SourceForge. One can worry about VA making the cut, but its problems are not going to be solved by spending money on Mesa/DRI development.
In fact, I still don't know what "critical" need Mesa/DRI provides. Linux will not become mainstream because of games; it still has problems providing a user-friendly GUI that matches most features found on commercial boxes, like windoze & Mac. And that's what drives away Mom, Pop, & Mr. Corporate honcho.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I will offer my opinion and ask others who know more than I do to clarify some issues.
I am under the impression that high profile websites like www.slashdot.org would be paid by their uplinks for the bandwidth they require. What I am hearing in the posts within is that VALinux has been funding us.
I have heard from sources I trust that companies like Microsoft and CNN are paid for at _LEAST_ the bandwidth required to feed their content into the net and that the companies who pay them are the telecomunications companies that need content to satisfy their customer base - IE.. ISP's.
I know my ISP for instance pays the Telephone company in this area, and I am certain that my Telephone company in turn pays their uplink (which I believe is sprintlink) for the bandwidth that is required to carry the content that I for instance wish to look at. I do know for a fact that I certainly pay my ISP.
Now www.slashdot.org provides content and this content as we all know requires bandwidth to be delivered. Since my Telephone Company does NOT have a direct connect to the slashdot servers the only way they can get access to this content is to _PAY_ for bandwidth to connect to the people who have a connection to the slashdot servers.
My reasoning is that if my Telephone Company for instance were to find it cheaper to do a direct connect to the SlashDot servers that they could then channel the money they save directly over to the slashdot webmasters and it wouldn't cost them a cent.
But the question in my mind is this... It appears that the content goes like this:
slashdot -> backbone-cloud -> mytelco -> myisp -> me
and the money goes like this:
slashdot -> backbone-cloud -< mytelco -< myisp -< me
To me this seems screwed up. Everyone in this picture who delivers content to the consumer is being paid for the service they provide, with the exception of the people who create it.
If the content creators are not paid, then the content will dry up. Of course there will always be tax payer funded content on the net and advertiser funded content and of course corporate interest content. But the type of content most of us want will dry up. I guess at that point we will have to decide whether we wish to continue to pay our ISP's for the bandwidth we no longer use and they in turn will have to decide whether they need as much bandwidth from their uplinks. Could this be why the telephone industry has cancelled its orders for fibre and equipment which has resulted in belt tightening at Corning and Nortel?
My suggestion is that if VALinux should be paid for at least the bandwidth required to deliever the content they make avaialble. This should not come from a subscription - this should come from their uplink because I for instance have already paid my ISP in good faith and they in turn pay a lot of money per month to the telephone company they connect through.