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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.
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.
What the hell do you do everyday as head of the "community department"? Post on bulletin boards? No wonder the guy was let go. He was moved from one pretty fluffy department ("communication") to an even lighter weight position. It seems pretty apparent he wasn't exactly a mainspring of the operation.
"Abusive layoff"? Sheesh. Get over yourself. Maybe it would be a better strategy to do something crucial for an organization so you're not part of the layoffs.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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.
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