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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).

3 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.

    --
    "There ought to be limits to freedom"
  2. 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.

  3. 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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    {{.sig}}