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Loki Aftermath Looks Bad
einer writes "Things look mighty bad for Loki employees. From this article it appears that some of them haven't seen a paycheck since late 2000. Perhaps the most telling part of the article is contained in a parenthetical near the bottom of the page: "A single employee is listed in creditor filings as being owed almost $350,000 in unpaid salary and in expenses the company incurred using the employee's credit card."" there's a lot of not-so-happy-stuff in this article.
Where I come from (Quebec), corporations can't claim bankrupcy protection for salaries: you can sue (personally) the board of directors of a company if you aren't paid your salary.
Don't these people have recourse ?
JP http://www.wearerite.com
Don't think that this is a mercurial or bad way to think. What would your employer have to say if you reneged on your half of the employment agreement, and then you had the nerve to demand six months of living expenses?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The key to not having your suppliers/employees leave at the first sign of trouble is having open accounting in your company. I'm run a small consulting firm - and had a cash crunch a few years ago, and *nobody* cared because all my books were open. Everything. Salary, expenses, capital items, AP, AR. Even contracts for all/upcoming jobs. Everything. If you looked at the books you could see that I just planned improperly - I ran out and got a personal loan, and all was well a month later.
The gratest thing about open books, is that you don't have to lie. And you can't fool yourself into thinking things are better than they are.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Unless you're working for yourself, never EVER put company expenses of any kind on a personal credit card or check.
My company about two years ago drafted a new policy for expenses where the employee fronts the bill and the company reimburses the employee (thanks to some salesmen who apparently thought a couple thousand dollars worth of golf bills each qualified as a business expense). Shortly thereafter they expected us to start paying for our own hotel rooms when out on service trips, at which point i politely informed our COO that his options were to issue us company credit cards for expenses or service the out of town clients himself. He tried to give us some idle threats about hiring employees who would be more complacent. Thanks to the solidarity of our development/engineering team, he was faced with the prospect of hiring an entire development team and expecting them to maintain the monumental pace at which we'd been going in a two week period, while we all went to work for a competitor who had given us all standing offers.
Guess who is fronting expense money up front now?
At the risk of being flamed, I have to say this:
What do you think of darling Loki now??
Linux gamers flocked to these forums pleading with people -- even non-gamers -- to buy something from Loki so they could stay afloat. Hopefully this will show that blind loyalty to a platform (Linux, Windows, who cares? They're all OSes, not religions) is sometimes misguided. If I would have temporarily dropped my who-cares-about-games-on-Linux stance and bought something from Loki, I'm guessing I would have only been supporting the allegedly crooked Draeker clan instead of supporting the company.
Sorry, but supporting a friggin' IP lawyer like Draeker isn't my idea of money well spent. The best we can hope for at this point is that the Draekers carry all of the guilt (if it's proven they're guilty) without dragging down Linux. I would think that's possible. The guy sounds like the s**t that s**t scrapes off its shoes. Folks who run companies and end up screwing the folks that made their business work deserve whatever hell that's dished out for them.
Having talked with several employees that worked for Loki, I feel I can honestly say that several of them were terribly idealistic and sold on the idea that Linux had a bright future on the desktop. Not only that, but that Loki was at the forefront of capitalizing on that bright future and that happy days were just around the corner. For someone that has even a modicum of idealism and a love for Linux and the future of free software, this wasn't hard to believe. Just look at the timeline and you can see that in the first year, things looked amazingly positive. Several games published. Quake 3 Arena in tin boxes. UT also being published (albeit not by Loki) just added more credence to the idea that Linux and the idea of Linux gaming were coming of age quickly.
As has been said before, Loki did several things correctly. That is, if a company has to appeal to the Linux community, then they should follow Loki's lead. Contacts in IRC and on newsgroups. Good tech support. The whole crazy LokiHack idea. They were all great ideas and pulled the community into the SDURF (Scott Draeker Un-Reality Field). If you have ever visited these forums where Lokiites could be found, you would have found out how enthusiastic everyone was about what was going on. These people believed and were willing to be poor but doing what they loved to make it happen.
Unfortunately, Loki seems to have been terribly mismanaged. It is unwise to go into details, but suffice to say that it could not sustain itself with the leadership that it had. Look at the timeline again, and you can see when people started to give up and leave for real paying employment. Look at the frequency of games after the beginning of 2000. Look at the SMAC debacle. Look at the crap that was released at the end (i.e. Postal Plus). Sadly, some gave up later than others, and suffered even more for that sacrifice.
Sometimes a dream means more than money or even family. In the case of Loki, it appears that those dreams were sold and exploited, hurting both the talented people that ported the games and provided the support and the people in the Linux community that bought the products. On a larger scale, the image of Linux has been tarnished as well, and it will make it even harder to move on from this fall.
I yearn for you tragically
AT Tappman,
Chaplain, US Army
I used to work for a technology consulting firm that worked solely with movie industry and law, with the board of directors made up of his lawyer frat brothers firm. Every year employees would go to Cannes in France or Sundance to work and help their clients from L.A. Well come mid-2000 something was obviously wrong with the company, the owner was quietly laying off people and reimbursement and pay checks would slowly come up late or show up the next pay period. Also, the owner who was once a happy, ambitious kind of guy, was getting bitter and quiet.
Regardless, some choose not to see the facts and kept on hoping things would get better and didnt want to loose their seniority they had built with the 3-5 years with this firm. Well Cannes was rolling around and some other festival thing in Italy as well. One my colleagues was asked to go and excitedly agreed. The owner, who always went, said he would meet him in Italy and then head off to France. Once there a per diem was renegged on, with owner citing that reimbursements would be made for any monies spent, since co-worker didnt believe it they decided to go cheap as possible. Checkout day and owner left a voicemail stating they had already started up to France and to meet there, not to worry about the hotel it was taken care of. As co-worker started to leave hotel security stopped them citing they needed to check out, co-worker thinking that just giving them room keys was not a big deal agreed. After getting to the counter the co-worker was told they needed to pay $7500.00 in hotel bills for 5 rooms, room service, and other amenities that the owner claimed was taken care of. Needless to say this co-worker did not have that kind of cash or credit limit on cards and ended up in an Italian jail. Luckily he had some family visiting in Sweden at the time and was able to get them to aid him in his time of need.
Upon returning he was able to get reimbursed after 30 days and immediately quit. And over 2000-2001 many lawsuits were brought against the owner and his company from employees, vendors, and IRS while he hid behind his corporate veil. Employees that were eventually never paid brought up lawsuits and went to the labor board. Problem is if someone is awarded a judgement it is the responsibility of the plaintiff to collect and of course this owner would not pay. So one has to go to court again and the cycle continues. Some could not handle legal costs and lawyers and dropped their cases, while others would have judges change their award from $2000.00 backpay to $17,000.00 for punishment. But again a futile effort if the business wouldnt pay $2000.00 why would they pay $17,000.00.
Ultimately the company folded, the company paid out some of the smaller judgements and settlements ignored the rest and folded. The owner losing his company and money decided to sue his clients! Some bigger studios and firms typically cost analyze a settlement and legal costs and he was able to make out with nice $50k checks here and there from larger multi million dollar firms/studios not wanting to be bothered, and with others that wanted to fight he would walk away.
Rumor has it that this scum has now started some 3 non-profit organizations and is starting to do well financially again, learning that non-profits have protection against the IRS.
Seems only the bad guy won on this one.
This isn't an idle concern. A while back a Ponzi scheme went under, and the person in charge of the bankruptcy demanded everyone who had received a check in the past 6 months (?) return the money.
That sounds good... until you realize that many of these checks were refunds on the original investment that were immediately reinvested. (The basic idea was that people would invest $1000 and get a post-dated check for $1200.) There was no allowance for that reinvestment, so an initial $1000 deposit could incur a demand for many times that.
The investors shouldn't count on getting back 100 cents on the dollar, but even getting zero cents back on the dollar is far better than losing an additional $3-10 on every dollar invested because the bankruptcy master is a moron. Or a greedy bastard, since her fee was a sizeable percentage of all money put back into the pool.
It was so bad that some investors committed suicide. And who could blame them - the bankruptcy master had sued them for their house, car, and all personal property to satisfy this "debt."
Bottom line: if you are owed back pay, you must insist that you receive a paycheck, not a loan.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken