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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).

2 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Just in Case... Slashdot Life Raft Plans? by idonotexist · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    "There ought to be limits to freedom"
  2. Sourceforge? by chrysalis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

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