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).
Sucks to be him
Gl @ finding another job
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
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.
The massive layoffs in the airline industry are going to take a large toll on the economy. It's said that the six largest airlines in the US could all be bankrupt by the end of the year.
I can only hope that the war stirs the economy up. It has done so in the past, but that was when we were still an industrial nation.
Got Rhinos?
Brian's home page
Slashdot interview with Brian
Press release about Brian winning Free Software Foundation Award for Mesa
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"
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
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.
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.
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}}
Seems reasonable to fire the people who would work on a given project for free anyways. Keep only people on project that nobody outside the company would work on, fire the rest, and let the community take over. Isn't that the strength OS?
Je ne parle pas francais.
So, VA axed the two DRI developer (read all about it at linuxgames.com), and now the Mesa developer! We are all screwed. The two people at VA did almost all of the work on DRI, and now they have to go and get other jobs...meaning DRI devel will slow down to a halt. Same for Mesa (good thing most of the work on 4.0 / OpenGL 1.3 compliance is already done).
Maybe there needs to be a non-profit formed (or maybe funded by SPI, the backers of Debian?) to fund a few developers to work on DRI/Mesa? I would REALLY hate to see this stuff die. There is a lot of work left to do. Maybe Loki can help, but they seem to be in a bit of financial trouble too (a small side note: the local ebgames carries tons of Loki games. I asked the clerk why (he turned out to be the manager) and he said they sell about 15 Loki games a week...about as many mac games they sell!), but it looks like Loki can get back on its feet (or maybe the local ebgames is a gigantic fluke? ~700 games per year is still small, but still...). I guess with VA screwing the DRI/Mesa people, Loki will _have_ to hire them, because Loki has a vested interest in the DRI and Mesa projects going forward (how do you sell 3d games without drivers to run them with...)
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
... maybe it would work, but who would stoop so low?
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.
corrected link
goddamn the postercomment compression filter
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Based on what?
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.
With all the important projects that are housed a SF it would be nice to think that there was an easy way to migrate or reestablish it in the event of closure, bankruptcy, etc. There's FSF's "Savanah" site but it might not be able to take the load and could possibly restrict projects to those using the GPL. Sometimes plugs on bandwidth get pulled very abruptly with little warning.
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
There are many 3D cards supported, but how many recent ones? NVIDIA does its own thing, IMG will be doing its own thing too ... that leaves ATI, Matrox might be getting back in the game but they never released the specs to their setup engine and with pixel&vertex shaders moving forward I doubt they will give enough data for drivers competetive with Windows.
So really in the future whats the purpose of open source OpenGL? Only for ATI cards and academic purposes?
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.
I guess it's about time to save all those precious sourceforge projects CVS bits elsewhere before everything is shut down and it's too late...
Visited Earth lately?
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
Hey, the way this economy is going, we might all wind up in boxes.
Woot w00t w007.
Geocrawler is no longer being maintained (http://www.geocrawler.com/about/)
Geocrawler is not the most important site in the osdn but it's usefull.
--Bram.
we'd be happy to go live in a box!
We lived in 5 feet of tractor-feed printer paper wrapped up in a stairwell, we did - all 47 of us kids.
From the age of 2, we had to code in Cobol on mainframes, paying 3 shillings a day for the privilege of working.
We had to get up at 02:30 to work 27 hours a day and when we got home our daddy would hit us over the head with a dead chicken until we fell asleep.
And when you tell kids these days, they don't even believe you.
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
cat
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.
VA never had the capabilities to ramp up to economies of scale that Compaq, and moreso, Dell have been able to exploit. No matter what kind of box VA pushed out, Dell could always sell comparable hardware for lower cost.
VA Linux got caught up in conflaguration of linux / day trading / tech stock hype. It is unlikely that this company should have ever have gone public, and it is unlikely they will continue to meet NASDAQ regulations for staying public.
I must say I snickered a bit as I watched their ranks diminish - there is nothing as nausiating as the self-aggrandizing bios people put up for themselves. I remember going to the Pyra.com site a couple of years back and had a good chuckle at how they described themselves as minor-deities. I can code XML! I read Kant! I' m unemployable!
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 issueLinux use in Dreamworks and PDI (LinuxJournal)
If you have followed tech stocks for the last year you may have noticed that NASDAQ hasnt been delisting hardly anyone. Egghead.coms stock was below around 9 months, and only reason it is delisted now is because it went bankrupt. Same with dozens of other stocks that should of been delisted many months ago. Some even a year ago. I dont really think they are following delisting guidelines anymore because of the economy, they want to give companies I chance.
Jeff Knox
They will be de-listed in a few months.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Yeah, it's understandable that VA (the hardware company) was funding this because a few years down the road they might have been in the position to compete with Sun and IBM in what's left of the 'workstation' market.
There's also the more general theory that with more 3D game support, Linux would get more uses, and some of that money might trickle back to VA. (It's analogous to Microsoft and Apple investing lots of money into CD-ROM technology in the 80s. They never made much money directly, but the widescale adoption of CD-ROMs indirectly allowed them to increase their sales.)
But, it was a long-term bet, and when you are a piddly company on the edge of existence, long-term bets aren't the best idea. Kinda like how Corel though they could do a Linux distro and 2-5 years out sell more Office Suites because of it.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
If a company's salespeople can go to corporations and give a credible pitch to provide solutions that will cut costs, support new business models and increased revenues, etc., consulting services are a relatively easy sell. I don't have any direct experience with VA Linux, but it seems to me that they faced an uphill battle in that area: "our consultants know Linux really well" isn't exactly on the top ten list of things IT managers and CxOs think they really need. (Nothing against Linux, but in itself, it's not a solution to any business problem except perhaps in the embedded market.)
I suspect consulting companies and open source will continue to coexist in future, but the focus will have to be around solving business problems, or there won't be any money in it and it won't survive commercially, except as a minor niche.
slashdot moderation is arbitrary and juvenile for the most part. often the posts I find best are at -1 or 0, so don't even get archived.
That is strange.
Woudn't it be better to bundle XIG GL drivers ( retail for 50$ or so ) instead of investing into programmers at, what was essentially a hardware company ?
XIG folks has been doing this stuff for years and it is simply stupid for VA folks trying to do the same thing with just a one guy.
They have to make up their mind : do they want to engage in public service or make money ?
VA has shut down their professional services organziation. The DRI developers (Kevin Martin, David Dawes, Brian Paul, Keith Whitwell, Jeff Hartmann, Alan Hourihane, Allen Akin, and myself) were all part of that layoff.
VA wasn't provinding the funding for us. We were funded by a number of other projects for graphics vendors and for other graphics research organizations.
There are efforts underway to get the team reassembled at another organization, but that is still very up in the air.
Thank you for the response. It puts the issue in a more meaningful light.
There may still be hope for these gentlemen. Perhaps they can apply for a research grant to develop the software (for scientific infrastructure development).
As for DCC, I'm satified to leave it to private enterprise. I still see an opportunity for these guys to convince these financially challenged companies to pool their resources into a consortium. Everyone wants a competitive advantage, but there is no point in reinventing the wheel X times.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The electical untilities were in this situation in the 70's. Small producers - perhaps people in a windy spot or someone with a creek wanted to pump electricity into the grid. Most didn't really have huge commercial interests... they just wanted to help the planet and conserve our non-renewable fossil fuels.
They were fought - and they won. In many if not most areas - if someone wants to generate _most_ of their electricity from say a windmill, then they will pay a connect fee to the grid and when they draw from the grid they pay at retail rates. If they have surplus they feed it into the grid and THEY ARE PAID - often at full retail rates because the powers that be deem this to be a desirable thing.
No one should decide who. It can be as simple as moniting the size of the pipe from the webservers. If the demand to your servers is handled by a 56K modem - don't expect to be paid. If the demand from your severs requires T1... then you should get a free T1 and your uplink should pay you the same as what they would pay say Sprintlink if they were to suck your content from them.
Suppose you need T3? If your web sites are so popular that a T3 is needed - then you might get $30,000 per month. If say Sprintlink is sucking T3 from your webservers then they are feeding same to their downlinks and they are going to make a tidy profit on this. Anything they pay to their content suppliers they mark up. So if they pay say $30,000 per month for the feeds from the webservers then they will bill the aggregate consumers of that bandwidth probably at least $45,000.
No one needs to decide - measure strictly on volumes. Then give everyone freedom to bid on who they want to have on board. If your content is really special - then let your potential uplinks bid for the connection. The market will sort itself out.
I see no more difficulty with 50,000 web masters vieing for the attention of the surfing public than I see with 50,000 chicken farmers vieing for the opportunity to put their eggs on your breakfast plate. What I have a problem with is large vested interests typically born of a protected monopoly each telling the chicken farmer that if his eggs are so great, then pay them for the delivery service and organise your own way to send a bill to the consumer.
Web content is a commodity. If slashdot web content is great then people will beat a path to their door and they deserve to profit from this so they can do more good work. Success and a service to the public should not be met with killer bills.
The surfing public in good faith have paid their ISP's and the ISP's (at least mine) have been quite diligent paying the telcos (in my case it is Telus)... because they know that if they don't they'll be disconnected.
I am certain that Telus spends millions for the access to the backbone. Here is a simple point in economics... in general the direction of the flow of money is opposite the direction of the flow of goods and services. So I will ask again: Upon what criteria does the direction of the flow of money suddenly reverse itself?
The question posed by you, Spudnic, is upon what critera should webmasters be compensated? I will retort this way: upon what criteria should they NOT be compensated and who should decide this?
check the list of insider sellers of VA for the words "Larry" and "Augustin" before you start baggin on anyone else for "cashing in".
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Just my thoughts.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Now, now, now, that's not a troll. Let's look at this realistically.
All the fancy new video card features, especially vertex shaders, are not supported in the only widespread open graphics library out there: OpenGL. Sure, you can use vendor-specific extensions, but that's not much of a solution. No one wants to have to write for specific makes of video card. Under Windows, DirectX just keeps advancing and, though it is still clunky and bloated, is at least keeping up--for the most part--with new developments in hardware. Under Linux, all of these features are irrelevant, as are features from the previous generation of video cards, like compressed textures (finally added to OpenGL 1.3 in the last several months). We're hopelessly behind.
It's not just Linux that's behind, it's any system that isn't Windows. We've gotten dependent on DirectX for 3D, and even old OpenGL stalwarts are finally caving in. What we need is is a new 3D API that's designed for what we now know about 3D hardware capabilities; one that is much simpler than current incarnations of OpenGL and DirectX. But with 3D hardware being the number one compatibility problem on modern PCs, I don't see how we're going to get into a better situation.
VA is out of the hardware business. They're also out of the contract hardware support business. Their remaining products are software and professional services, with an overwhelming emphasis on servers: storage management and clustering, SourceForge and so forth.
The occasional professional services gig that involves rolling out 3D engineering and CGI workstations hardly justifies keeping lead Mesa and DRI developers on board. Nearly all of VA's engagements deploy machines that never run in a graphic mode, and indeed often don't have a monitor connected at all.
As for Loki, they claim to have a positive cash flow now. Bringing on video driver developers might not be something they can afford, though, especially while under bankruptcy protection. Loki develops for a small market with low margins: gamers using Linux desktops more or less exclusively. I'd sooner think that DRI and Mesa developers would find a home with companies making high-end 3D design and animation tools, and with consumer electronics companies making video-related appliances.
In the message that Brian Paul put on the DRI list, he indicated that there was some talk by some of the former employees re-forming something like PI- but that it was more talk than action at this point. He also indicated that most of them still wanted to carry forward, but that the going would be slow for a while as the former DRI developers gathered up the smoking pieces of thier lives.
Of note: Gareth Hughes is now working for NVidia in their GL group from what was said in back and forth conversations with him on the DRI developer's list.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
They can't legally ask for everything. They can only ask/insist for the stuff that is pertinent to their current lines of business.
And I'd not take a job with a company that asks for such a thing- they KNOW it's not legal and they put it in there anyway. What other bogus things are they up to?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas