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Mandriva Fires Founder Gael Duval, Who Plans to Sue
Otter writes "Mandrake Linux founder Gael Duval has confirmed that Mandriva has let him go." A few hours later, Newsforge (owned by the same company that owns Slashdot) did an exclusive IRC interview with Gael in which he said he plans to sue his former employer for "abusive layoff." This is a sad day for Mandriva -- and for GNU/Linux in general. Gael was the founder and heart of the original Mandrake (now Mandriva) project, which was the first Linux distribution designed to be easy for non-technical users to install and administer. There is plenty of consternation in the Mandriva Club Forums about whether the company will go on supporting individual desktop users as strongly as it has in the past.
Well of course being open source. We're immune from situations like this.
I sincerely hope this does not affect the course of the distro, and that it continues to remain as user-friendly and true to it's founding values, but I'm beginning to think Ubuntu has replaced Mandrake/riva as the No 1 user-friendly distro.
If you start the company, you dictate the policies. If he gave up his power to someone else (and for profit, likely), he should have expected this possibility. Still a dick thing to do, though.
at the local LUG many users bailed on t hem after the mess that was Mandriva 2006. It is buggy and has problems compared to the Mandrake version just before it. That started a flocking to Ubuntu and Gentoo at the LUG (A 100 pack of Ubuntu Cd's coming in that month did not help matters either.
They really dropped the QC on the distro they released right after the Mandriva change and that really hurt them.
Now the management is making changes inside as well.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Caldera had a semi-decent mostly commerical OS out there, and then when they were bought up they slowly but certainly dropped any pretense of being interested in the home/enthusiast market. Of course, Mandrake had much more of a tie with the community; but it seems their tie to the community just walked out the door, didn't it?
Let's hope Mandriva doesn't suddenly decide that its' IP is in the linus kernel!
Call it TruMandriva or somesuch, and all his adherents will follow him.
Let the legal goodness commence!
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
... that everyone needs to concentrate on litigation and legal battles instead of making a difference by doing something constructive. Before seeing this story, I was just thinking about an article where someone said businesses in the U.S. need to stop whining about everything foreign business competition and they need to start competing with those foreign businesses instead. The trouble is that the government, meaning federal, state, county, city, and otherwise, is and has been abusing businesses for a long time with all kinds of taxes, fees, and administrative overhead that does nothing for anybody. So of course American products must cost more to cover the costs.
Mandrake was my distro of choice before seeing the Light and converting to Debian, and I remember that it was a great distribution... but somewhere they lost the path and starting falling to the ground: the LG drives fiasco, the name change, the bloat, the battle with Ubuntu for the easy-to-use-linux crown...
Maybe Gael has now the oportunity to create from zero a great new distribution without the inherents problems of Mandrake/Mandriva!
I sincerely hope so.
--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that this may not be such a bad thing. Mr. Duval may now start another project, and build something good again. Mandrake(driva) had really started to fall off a few releases ago in my opinion. Many people I know are using Fedora now that used Mandrake in the past. I certainly feel bad that Mr. Duval is now unemployed, but perhaps we can build something positive out of this. Mandrake used to be the distro I told people to start with, lately it's been Ubuntu. Perhaps this can be a day remembered as the day a new distro was born, and it was also today that Mandriva lost a great asset. Just trying to remain positive.
We have your IP and you are soooo gone!
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
It was only a matter of time before someone brought a Penguin suit.
What is happening to the right to fire? We're not even talking non-union workers here. A company, public and private too, ought to be able to fire in accordance with that sole law of maximizing shareholder wealth for public companies -- If the given employee is not helping an organization pursue that goal, that should be cause enough.
I have been fired only 48 hours after working for one place with no reason at all other than the manager didn't like me.
Most states are right to work so they can do that.
Employers have the right to fire people on spot for any reason at all. The reason why I am agaisnt suing is because its unfair that blue collar workers such as myself have no right at all and get paid 1/5th what the upper middle class white collar workers do which do sue for wrongfull termination. We have no rights at all and have to sign contracts making us employed at will.
And most states even the CEO can be fired for no reason at all if its a right to work state.
Also the shareholders own the company and yes if the CEO owns less then %50 of the company then he can be fired. Its just part of business. ANd if you owned a company I think most people would have a different opinion as bad workers can make or break your company and take your dreams down with it when you go under.
http://saveie6.com/
just in time.
Mandrake 8.2 was that distro's best release, IMO. I left it when they had that "burn your CDROM up" problem. Not for that, but because I felt it was going down hill. Now I run SimplyMEPIS.
A few weeks ago I booted a LiveCD of PCLinuxOS. It is, IMO, much better than Mandriva, from which it is derived. They have cleaned many of the bugs out. For those who run Mandriva I hope that PCLinuxOS has the horsepower to keep that distro alive on their own. I prefer distros that use *.deb packages so I won't be leaving SimplyMEPIS anytime soon.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I sincerely hope this *does* affect the course severely. I hope Gael Duval forks the project and starts up a competitor and successfully competes with Mandriva who know longer has any idea what a community is.
Suing for "abusive layoff."
wtf? Is there such thing as a 'feel-good' layoff? If you're going to sue for wrongful dismaissal, at least get the wording right if you bitch publicly
This is a just business transaction. It happens all the time. If Gael Duval wants to, he can just create (yet) another distro that will abide by his Linux philosophy. How is this a tragedy or something bad - other than for him - maybe?
Saturday is April 1. Slashdot will be shut down. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I used to be a hardcore Mandrake user, but since the merger the QC has totally sucked. I couldn't ever get a 2005 or 2006 install to work quite right and I've dropped my subscription. Getting fired sucks, but please Mr. Duval, bring us another great distro instead of spending years in court.
He's a strong contributor? But he happens to be in job they have to lay off?
Bean counter alert.
Nice way to work in a completely inappropriate reference to libertarian ideals on what is essentially a spat between a company and its founder.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Seriously, though, the White House press corps should pick this up. "Next on NBC Nightly News, our exclusive IRC interview with the president."
* PublicistLackey has joined #whouse
* StonezzzPhilipsNBC has joined #whouse
* W has joined #whouse
[StonezzzPhilipsNBC] Prez, why r u h8ing on detainees @ Gitmo + Abu?
* StonezzzPhilips kicked from #whouse
[W] Next question?
I was a dedicated drake user for years. And yes, I bought their product. I bought 7.0, 7.2, and 9.2. It always recognized all my hardware, was easy to upgrade, and had all the necessary tools, etc. Then 10.x kinda sucked, and the latest incarnations were poor. Hardware recognition slacked, it didn't install on the same system that 9.x installed on, and now, they have subscriber support only for some wifi cards.
I installed ubuntu and never looked back. it recognized all my hardware (even the USB wifi), and apt-get is far superior. It's a sad day for sure, but they only have themselves to blame. They made poor financial decisions and it hurt their product. Now, I do confess to having been an iBook user for a few years and haven't used linux nearly as much. Most of my development is LAMP, java, python, etc., and it's all the same on OS X or linux. OO.org runs great, and so does GIMP, and with fink/darwinports, I don't "need" linux. So, I haven't used a "PC" in quite some time, but that doesn't diminsh the fact that my one remianing PC at homeruns ubuntu not mandriva.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
OO.org 2 was in contrib, as far as I recall.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
Come on kids, don't be like Microsoft.
Just plain LOL... All my imaginary mod point are belong to you!
I guess, he is now layed off, the question is this, who owns the company now? Can we trust them?
In France, a country in Western Europe (near Belgium), they have such a thing as 'licenciement abusif'. This is a standard term of employment law.
'Licenciement' is French (the language spoken in France, and other countries such as Belgium) for layoff. 'Abusif' is French for 'abusive'.
HTH. HAND.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
I've been using Mandrake since 2001, when I switched from Debian to get a version of X that would support my new video card. At the time, it was was flourishing, engaged the community surrounding it, and was hiring developers who were working on projects that were making crucial advances for Linux. One that comes to mind was the developer of a partition resizer that would work on NTFS back when when all the other distros were instructing their users to use Partition Magic.
Of course, all that great work had a price tag attached to it, so when Mandrake Club was announced, I was first in line to join. The idea back then was that it was a voluntary donation with no extra benefits other than supporting continued development.
Unfortunately, once the club started to take off, they started closing things off to the public one by one to drive membership numbers higher. Now it's to the point where standard members can't even download the full set of CD images for their $60 yearly membership fees.
Something seems to have really changed in a big way since the Connectiva merger, though. With the release of Mandriva 2006, they've been focusing on marketing deals like that with Skype. Then, there was the worldwide Mandriva party, where the locations weren't announced until the night before... until then, there was just a form to fill out for organizations to get corporate schwag.
Also, I was reading on the Mandriva forums earlier that the reason their cut of X.org doesn't work with my ATI Radeon 7500 is that they "chose the wrong X.org" and are staying with it due to an Intel marketing agreement. Luckily, seerofsouls.org has working RPM's, but needing to depend on a third party to provide core components of the distribution is not exactly ideal.
Anyway, it looks like their management has decided that it wants to be Red Hat or Novell. I wish them good luck with that. I've seen it mentioned that PCLinuxOS is trying to be what Mandrake was, so hopefully they will provide a good upgrade path from Mandriva so I can get off this sinking ship without getting my clothes too wet.
From his blog...
I looked for a laptop for my wife who is studying neurosciences and basically needs it for ImageJ, and office applications. [snip] After spending hours looking for the best model, we finally choose the Acer 3003 wlmi which can be found for around 800 euro/1000 USD with either 512 or 1024 MB RAM, a nice wide-screen, DVD Dual layer burner and a Ultra ATA hard-disk.
Maybe it was much less than 800 euro.
Google returns effectively 1 hit for this term. Can anyone elaborate? What exactly would constitute an abusive layoff?
"This wound is beyond my ability to heal. We need Elvis medicine!"
Now he knows how all those Americans he fired felt when he closed down all the American operations for Mardrake a number of years back. (Just for being Americans.)
Could not have happened to a more deserving fellow.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Lycoris was a great distro, but I didn't like the Redmond mindset that the founder took with him from the evil empire. I cut my teeth on Mandrake and I had a feeling as soon as these two entities joined forces one of two things could happen: 1. A really awesome user friendly distro, or 2. The Redmond money hungry mindset would spread like cancer.. Unfortunately I believe that Mr. Mandrake had some core differences about how things should be ran which hindered the "bottom line"... That gave Redmond clone enough reason to fire him..
I just hope that this doesn't become a trend in the GNU/Linux community, computers in general were about fun and learning until big business started getting greedy.. Linux is the last man standing when it comes to Free, Fun and Educational..
Jimi Spier
www.jimispier.com - My tunes
Ulteo seem to have ripped off Mozilla.org's web design. They even use the same class names. If you view their stylesheets, you'll see:
If you read the Mozilla.org site licensing policies, you'll see:
Seems to me that Mozilla.org want their text copied, but not their site design, which is the exact opposite of what Ulteo have done.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Such a move like this doesn't surprise me.
I was an avid Mandrake user until it became Mandriva. The quality of the distro and the community seemed to take a turn in the wrong direction. After sampling a few distros, I finally settled on Ubuntu.
What I wonder is how a former-VP :
... manages to only put out a 3-pages PDF that was only mildly interesting.
* who has been asked to depart the company (as a hint that his services are not needed anymore, and he is offered an easy and honourable way out),
* who instead decides to stay and start a new department,
After any merger, there are always redundant positions. Gael Duval should have got the hint and leave with a nice press release saying something like "I'll be pursuing my goals as in this momment in my life I want to do blah blah blah.".
This would have been nice of him. He would have kept an open door at Mandriva. And any company would have liked how he had exited his company.
Now, he is a walking problem. Do you think any company would like to hire a manager that sues his employer?
I don't think so.
"It's not personal, it's businness"
BTW, I use Mandriva, and I've used for a long time. Mandriva is pretty good, works for me, does all what I want, I have no trouble with it. All the FUD read here by Mandriva-haters ("rpms are bad", "apt-get is the best", "ubuntu is dah shiznitz", "Gentoo is the only way", "PCLinuxOS does everything pus more") is just FUD.
Peace
In the US we have a better end-run around that sort of thing. We just place unreasonable goals and expectations on our employees, underpay them, and ride them as hard as we can. Then when they begin to come apart at the seams (and begin to manifest the personality traits of someone who's being driven to the edge of their sanity) we can label them as underperforming, or bad behavior, or anti-social. If they don't acquiesce to the subsequent managerial flogging we can then terminate them. The company documentation will, of course, read "behavioral issues".
No. We don't fire on a whim. What we do is create the situation and then blame the victim.
The government itself is not stealing your liberties. Their new programs are enabling criminals who will.
From my point of view, the place of Mandrake as an easy-to-use desktop distribution has been taken by Ubuntu. I know--they are very different distributions internally, but to me, they feel similar.
I believe the term we are looking for is employment at-will. I don't know about France, but several states have the concept of at-will employment. For more info see: http://jobsearchtech.about.com/od/laborlaws/l/aa09 2402.htm
That was always the 'lamor' or 'linux for windows dummies' distro as far as I thought.
Now, Ubuntu and Gentoo cover that market niche, so I'd have to say this is a (sad, but) good thing for the guy.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
This always interests me. Donate money to a for-profit entity in order to further its pursuit of profits? Why, exactly? I have donated to Wikipedia, for example, because I can see its budget and know that the money will go to where it's needed--hosting fees and equipment, for example. Why would I donate to Encyclopedia Britannica?
Similarly, why would I donate to Mandriva, or to Canonical (Ubuntu Co.) or to Red Hat? I don't want to fatten anybody's pocket. If they want donations, they could go non-profit. If the for-profit entities had a product worth paying for, I'd pay for that. Otherwise I'd rather donate money to a not-for-profit distro (like Gentoo, or Debian) or to a non-profit that furthers free software (like the Free Software Foundation.)
Our present forum isn't exempt from this thing that puzzles me: OSTG, for-profit operators of SourceForge, solicit donations for SF. Why would I give to them?
Penny - plain text accounting
Thank you! Thank you!!! I'm so tired of people who believe that the more government regulation there is, the closer the economy comes to some kind of workers' utopia. People don't understand that the balance of power CAN, in fact, tilt too far in favor of workers, and France is a prime example of what happens.
There's a good reason why France has 10+ percent unemployment, and it's not because there isn't work to be done. Employers just won't risk hiring people because of business-hostile labor laws.
And think of the people that do have jobs; they're being forced to pick up the slack!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I realised how immoral a closed source operating system is and decided to give Linux a try.
This was around the year 2000, Suse to be precise, could not get on the net with it, could not get Xserver to work. Then I tried Coral linux, Xserver worked fine, could not get dialup to work, then I tried Redhat that did not work either.
Then I heard about Mandrake (probably on Slash :) at last I had an open source OS that seemed to work with hardly any hassle.
Gael Duval, opened the open source OS door for me and for many others I would imagine. What the organisation that Duval started, solved was the driver problem, for this he deserves respect and support from the Linux community and I hope the Slashdot community.
Regards
Peter
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
Supposing Duval started a new project... any chance Mandriva would screw up, acquire Duval, and make him chief once more? Something like the Apple fairy tale.
Can't be done. Once the company is through running their employees out the door they label them as bad in HR databases. Don't give me that crap about wrongful dismissal or slander claims. Lawyers don't give a rat's ass unless you already have a pile of money to donate to them.
No. Here in America we've got our own little system for fucking people over. If you've got it good well then more power to you. Don't act like your lucky lot in life is the same for everyone.
The government itself is not stealing your liberties. Their new programs are enabling criminals who will.
As a software engineer, it is frustrating to see how hard it is for software companies to find a profitable business model.
I have actively tried to find work with companies where the core product is software. The reaon is simply that of opportunity. In a hospital, at an attorneys office etc, a software developer can never be the strong voice in corporate meetings. It is the attorney and physician respectively. The SW engineer can not advance to the top of the corporate ladder.
The closest I have found is engineering companes like Cisco where engineers are paid well. Although an engineering company, the focus here is still not software, but hardware.
Most High tech companies sell boxes and software is used by the sales department to land the deal. Often discounting it 100% at "no charge".
It is then hard to fight with the HW group for resources when you have little revenue to justify your departments existence.
We all love to hate Microsoft, but they are one of the few companies that have been successfull and profitable as a software company.
How should a company like Mandrake structure their business model so they can be consistently profitable, and not have to go through bankruptcies and tough layoffs?
I need to be able to have a well paying stable job so I can put my kids through college. Any solutions out there?
"Fix it"
SUSE was sold to Novell, founder of SUSE fired.
Mandrake was sold, founder fired.
Any Linux company for sale? How about Ubuntu? Tomahawk? may be you guys can earn lot of money by selling the company than trying to earn. who cares firing you then, if you get good enough money to go to moon.
"It seems that the company is going to address the corporate market more and more.... My opinion is that we should have stuck to the roots (individuals and SOHO)."
I have never seriously considered any other distribution since I bought my first box (7.1). Linux had not really arrived enough to replace my home Windows system, so I waited for 8.0 before trying seriously again. As a systems engineer working with UNIX systems, and after having great difficulty with UnixWare 2.0 at home, and lack of results with WGS Linux, I was glad to see Mandrake "arrive". I finally committed to Linux. Then I had an opportunity to manage a server for my engineering department and RedHat 7.2 with Mandrake 9.x, then 10.1, and now Corporate Server 3.0. I've tried others... and yet remain a Mandriva user, so something is very good over there.
For all this, I must painfully acknowledge that Mandriva just convincing in any role that touts helping the community. The user has been told that if they pay, they will will get help. The user says show me what I get for free, and then I will believe, and will happily pay when it really matters.
Mandriva has always offered more up front for the community in terms of graphical, customized tools for configuring the system so that the job gets done, but that is about where it ends. "After the sale" the user must largely rely on their own resourcefulness. The superiour Mandriva tools buy most users in, but consider that today, MandrivaExpert has 2600+ open issues dating back to 2003. Bugzilla is full of issues _never_ responded to. Corporate Server 3.0 has issues against it that have been in Anthill and Bugzilla for going on two years.
I say all this to say, Mr. Duval, you might as well not bother suing if you care about the community. Mandriva will either accomplish something for the community, or they will cripple along meaning well, but missing the main realization of how to hit big-time.
Mr. Duval, MandrivaExpert, Anthill, and Bugzilla all show that Mandriva does not know how to support the community. Mandriva will not make it big time in the Corporate Community based on my most recent experience with Corporate Server 3.0. Please do not prove to the community that they do not matter to you either. A suit will only take from that community. This organization can spend more time on long distance explaining how a problem does not fall within scope than it would take to solve a loyal user's problem.
Leave them be. They will either become of more value to the "root" community or business community, or they will not. Let them do it to themselves without doing yourself a disservice, and by crippling what little support they do provide "after the sale". They have not been connected that tightly to either a business or a community root inspite of what one might have thought.
Signed, a devoted, paying Mandrake/Mandriva user, today and tomorrow, but maybe, just maybe, not forever.
10% unemployment is not that bad if there isn't a lot of underemployment and miscounting like there is in the US. The US has an artificially low unemployment rate because the labor department doesn't count all people who are not employed, just the ones recently laid off. They also do not take underemployment into account: someone who works retail or fast food just because they can't find work in his/her profession is considered fully employed. This can give rather misleading numbers.
I have a spare machine, but it is already taken up by FC5Test3 and I am not currently in the mood to dive into another disto myself. But I can hold my curiousity nolonger. What makes Ubuntu so user friendly? I take it that you have first hand knowledge.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Please, please!
There you are, staring at me again.
Anonymous because I realized someone might kill my free webhosting ;-)
I Just got an invoice.... March 9
It lists
someone else's company name
My Proper Name
My billing information
My Phone Number
someone else's company fax [working] ;-)
and of cousre the transaction goes through ;-)
It was a surprise tht it was a delayed 7 months of monthly subscriptions in one month.
I'll renew my ip after this post and it'll be fine when I wake up ;-)
I _pray_ ;-)
My free hsting is for a shared server [like 80% of us poor buggers] & i'd hate to piss of the generous buggers who donate my server location/hosting I hope you understand ;-P it's nothing personal ;-0.
oh oh eyes are closing I bettter grab some shut eye ..
I've recently given up my club membership, too. Really, over $100 for a year's subscription...when editions are only going to come out yearly! Mandriva did have gobs of packages...almost to the debian level. However, my main interest was all the nice proprietary software (no flames please), since I was a newbie.
I just updated my wife's computer to kubuntu and was pleased to see how easily installing the ATI drivers were with synaptic. The Debian repositories have more software than any other distro that I know of. Other than mandriva, I had always loved straight Debian and mepis. Now I am with happy kubuntu...bye bye Mandriva, it was a nice time...
Building a healthy future; Connecting communities
I wonder why I'm running Mandriva 2006 with absolutely no problems (except the incredibly stupid menu editor, of course, which everyone acknowledges is braindead.)
Everything on my machine (your standard clone) worked out of the box. I think the DSL setup wasn't as nice as Knoppix, but then nobody else's is any better that I'm aware of.
So they fired the guy who created the company. Big deal. Happens every day. I have yet to see anybody demonstrate that this means anything about where the distro is going or how easy future versions will be to use or anything else of significance. When it happens, call me.
And if it does go bad, well, there's plenty of other distros to try. Everybody is touting Ubuntu/Kubuntu. So far I've seen no reason to switch absent some major failing of Mandriva that might crop up. It's not hard for a distro to piss me off, though, so maybe it will happen here, too.
I just read a review of Fedora Core where it's clear those idiots STILL haven't figured out how to do decent package management - now, instead of the perfectly usable KPackage from back in 7.3 days, they've got TWO package managers installed, NEITHER of which show you the dependencies or where the files are installed.
Morons.
So why am I bothering to comment on this at all? Good question...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
It seems that Gaël has started to work on a mysterious new OSS OS project called Ulteo
Does this sad event mark the end of the Mandriva as a distribution? Or at least the start of the end? I used Mandrake once and found it to be OK, but since then ,the heat has cirtainly been put on by distros such as Ubuntu and Linspire for ease and OpenSuSE and FC for power. We'll see.
return 0; }
Will this mean that Mandriva will now become a more stable and less buggy distribution?
Hmmm, in Mandriva's case, wouldn't a position meant to improve its image be called "quality assurance engineer"?
Mandrake/Mandriva has always been buggy, it's almost as if buggyness had been one of its defining "qualities".
Years ago I was with a friend helping him to re-organize his hard disks. At a certain point in time, we needed to burn some stuff on a CD to make space.
After burning the CD, just before rm -rf'ing the files from the hard disk, I had a hunch, and said: "Wait a minute, this is Mandrake, just lets make a diff -ur first, to be safe".
And sure enough, all files on the CD turned out to be empty... A bug in Mandrake's mkisofs. We proceeded to download mkisofs's source, and compiled it, burned another CD with it, and that one was just fine!
Years after, I frequently run into issues with corrupted .kde directories due to Mandrake bugs.
More years after (at that point it was Mandriva), I encountered issues with permission management in Samba. The (numerically) same version, and same config worked just fine on Debian.
Say no to software patents.
including applying for permission with the government prior to firing the person.
Sometimes I just have to shake my head when I read crap like this. It's no wonder you americans are so fucking disconnected from reality when even your schools spread propaganda FUD.
FWIW: Yes, bonehead, you can get fired here and no, the employer doesn't have to ask anyone for permission, but, just like in the glorious (halleluya, motherfucker) usa, you can sue for wrongful dismissal.
Fuck.
AFAIK, Gentoo compiles "everything" when you install it. So how is it possible to get a complete install in under 40 minutes?
I'm also not going to renew my Mandrake/Mandriva silver membership. Mandrake was my number one choice until I ran into bad stability problems with 10.1. Mandrake never answered any of my bug reports and they never released a stable kernel to fix the problem that I and several others ran into.
The problem was solved by using a kernel from Mdk10.0 or compiling your own but the incident just left a bad taste in my mouth.
You're assuming that the employer is at least semi-reasonble. You're not thinking about this from the proper point of view: the company is deliberately screwing their employees.
At the last two jobs, I did what you hold so highly. I turned in my resignation. In both cases the response from HR was,"We're sorry. We cannot accept your resignation. Instead we're going to fire you." Now, what can you do? If you're walking away from what was obviously a bad job, you don't have tens of thousands of dollars saved up, and lawyers, frankly, do not give a shit. The HR department can write up all of the papers that it needs, literally fabricate them out of thin air, to make a case that they terminated with cause. Try claiming unemployment? Denied. Why? "Denied due to termination." But I wasn't terminated. I resigned. "Sorry, that's not what the company reports."
You're trying to make your points as if there's some sort of rules of honesty, fairness, and justice that a company is required to follow. They're not, and when they want to screw you over, they can. If you happen to be the sort of person who is socially well-connected or has a measure of personal independent wealth they do not screw you over because they know that you can fight back. If, however, you are identified as an easy target without an external support system then you have no chance.
How naive can you be? What ivory tower do you live in?
The government itself is not stealing your liberties. Their new programs are enabling criminals who will.
There's certain contexts that you'll run afoul of other laws...
For example, if you put an onerous clause(s) in your employment agreement and they say they can't sign it in that form, that they're willing to discuss it and ammend it so it's acceptable to both parties- you can't dismiss for that reason unless there's a good deal of negotiations if you didn't disclose the agreement as part of the offer letter. To do so will be an unfair employment practice per Federal law and you can end up in that sort of lawsuit.
Another one would be "laying off" someone, citing financial reasons, and they're the only one laid off. Again, that's problematic for the same reasoning.
Same goes for saying "we no longer need your services", only to hire someone else shortly afterward. If you didn't do anything wrong job performance-wise or didn't do anything insubordinate, you can't just be let go in that manner. The only reasoning you are allowed for this one is if the job posting in question was actually removed- you no longer need their services for what they were doing because you're not doing it anymore.
Most people don't pursue the last two because it's difficult to prove and doesn't usally get anything useful done- but it DOES get tried from time to time and typically when the employer really screws things up. I know, I've been there...
This is not to say that you can't fire people for dismissable things- but there's a lot more to employment law, right to work and at-will employment not withstanding. You CAN get into a bind for dismissing people in the wrong way or under the wrong circumstances- but people do it all the time because people don't get the resources at their disposal to pursue the matter in question.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Hello,
As said on ulteo.com, the community is building:
- http://ulteo.org/
Yann