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).
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"
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}}
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.
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.
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...
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.
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)
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.