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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.
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.
I like both Ubuntu (in Xubuntu form) and Kanotix, so I suggest you burn the live CDs of each and check them out.
Kanos Script Page has some useful install scripts for handling what you want, and the people on the forums are helpful.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
Many places in Europe, IIRC, you can't just fire anyone for any reason.
While there may be a legal right to terminate employees, one I certainly don't agree with, for any reason in the USA, it is ultimately counterproductive due to decreased worker morale. I know I'd think twice about working for a company who fires their employees on whims. I'd also do poor work if I had to continuously worry that today might be my last day.
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
Empirically, indulging the greedy desires of the few appears to be the best guarantee of quality of life for the rest.
Or do you have any better systems to propose? (Difficulty: if you have to stick a gun in peoples' backs to get them to adopt your system, your system sucks.)
To me, that is a scary thought.
If I own a business, I have the right as theowner to discontinue paying them for their services at anytime for any reason unless I have signed a contract with them stipulating otherwise. To think that I cannot fire an employee for poor performance or bad decision making sounds absolutely insane.
Mandriva has every right to terminate his employment for _nearly_ any reason.
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
I know I'd think twice about working for a company who fires their employees on whims. I'd also do poor work if I had to continuously worry that today might be my last day.
And thus the system self regulates. Due to the deep complexity of the US economy, this model works. Employees can quit and move on to another company. In smaller markets, this may not work since there may not be acceptable substitutes but in the US economy, it works very well.
Just look at EDS, its a shadow of what it once was because of firing on a whim management policy (Dick Brown you suck). Morale dropped, good employees left, then many of their customers left. Microsoft, may suffer the same fate. Their current policies and environment are very similar to EDS 4 years ago. As long as the economy has the ability to normalize itself, At-Will employment works and works well.
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
"Right to work" has nothing to do with termination rules. It basically means that a worker isn't required to join a union. Many union factories require that all blue collar workers are part of the union, but in "right to work" states, these policies are outlawed. Hence the term "right to work(without joining the union)".
70% of statistics are made up.
I agree. The company is more than one person there are probably hundreds of people working there. As management it is your job to make sure that the people there continue to get paid. If one person is making it impossible(or harder) to do that then you're doing a disservice to those hundreds of other people by not letting that person go. If your options are Paying 501 people for a couple more months or paying 500 indefinately the decision is simple. That's more than likely a gross exageration of the situation, but we don't know the details at all. It's silly for us to be arguing without knowing anything and if he really feels he was wronged, it will be settled in court.
i could not think of anything clever.
Well of course being open source. We're immune from situations like this.
Well, if not immune, at least less vulnerable.
After all, suppose you spend ten years creating your Magnum Opus, the thing that's going to change the world. Then the managers you originally hired to handle the boring business stuff turn around and fire you. If your work is proprietary, that's it. Find a new life's work.
Within open source, you go to the spare bedroom, pop the source CD's, and open up a new sourceforge project. Your employment agreement might be a bit of a hurdle, but with any luck it's written with proprietary software in mind. "Uh, your honor, I'm not selling any products that compete with my former employer."
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
My thought exactly. There are way too many distros, each with its own way of doing stuff. If we really want Linux on the desktop, there should be fewer distros, not more. This kind of infighting just leads to confusion.
What is happening to the right to fire?
There's no such right. Before you criticise, consider this: do you have the right to fire a worker for not sucking you off in your country? No? Then your "right to fire" has limitations too. Whether you can legally fire somebody depends on the circumstances.
The real question is why he was fired. If, as you wildly speculate, he was fired because it's more profitable for the company that way, then sure, they should be able to fire him. But you only have their word for that. It does seem to be a bit odd that they have been hiring in 2006, are firing the very person that created their core product, and yet deny having any problems with him.
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."
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.
I disagree. I disagree because because my experience of Mandrake is that the user experience has been far worse than its rivals and if you asked me what the No.1 User Friendly distro was a few years back, it certainly wouldn't be Mandrake. Red Hat perhaps, SUSE probably not, but no way Mandrake. The "Drak" tools were consistently buggy, marred by horrible usability issues, not very task oriented and were slapped onto the side of the desktop with the finesse of tractor welded to a car. User friendly implies usability and I recall Mandrake tools couldn't even get simple things right like the order of buttons on message boxes. I used it from about 6.3 to 8.0 and my experience was that each progressive release got buggier and buggier and I finally gave up on it. I revisited it for 9.1 and 9.2 and it was just as bad - worse even since the fundamental issues with the usability never seem to be fixed.
The only thing in my book which set Mandrake apart from Red Hat, SUSE or whoever was a larger number of packages on the CD and bleeding edge version numbers. I wouldn't hold SUSE's config up as an example of usable either, but it was at at least reliable and consistent. It's even almost pleasant to use in SUSE 10, assuming you run a KDE desktop.
I do like Ubuntu though. I think the shitty brown theme is horrid, but the integration and use of GNOME tools makes for a seamless and very pleasant desktop experience. That's what Linux should be like and its about time that it is. Now distros are paying attention to usability, Linux may finally start to appear on a few more desktops.
Correct. And this being France, there are some very strict laws about when someone can be fired. The net result of this is that lawsuit about being fired are common, companies are afraid to hire people, and companies can't weather downturns or adapt by firing people. Gee, and the French wonder why their economy isn't as strong as they want it to be.
Before anyone says anything - I actually grew up there and still have family there. Which is one of the reasons why I'm so pissed off about this situation. They're shooting themselves in the foot and don't want to realize it.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Well, corporations are permitted to exist because they are perceived to increase the public good. When they don't, then they have violated their mandate. I've got news for some people, capitalism is not an ethos. It so happens that it seems to be of greater public benefit than competing systems. When you start justifying your means to the detriment of your ends, you've lost your ethical compass, and it's time to recalibrate.
But it is a problem, let's say you've spent a couple of years using a partiular distribution, you know its quirks and the staff are used to it. Then bang, the business goes and the distribution is no longer supported, what happens to your service contract? No different from proprietory OSs.
I don't think linux and user friendly belong in the same sentence. Troll mod me if you must, but the last time I tried to install Mandriva the sound was broken, the last time i tried to install Ubuntu the installer crashed due to lack of PCI express support, and the last time I tried to install Gentoo i get all sorts of wierd udev shit on boot about /dev/hdc3 not being a valid device. Maybe I'm retarded, but is it even possible to screw things up with genkernel+coldplug+ReadingTheFuckingManual while installing? I think i'll wait untill devfs becomes (more?) depricated before i try installing Gentoo again.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
Pay anybody you want for support? Hire a competent sysadmin for support? Migrate to another system at your own pace confident that all your data is stored in open, documented file formats?
Not quite the exact same thing as dealing with the planned obsolescence, products designed to be single-vendor supported, and closed, sometimes encrypted data formats used in the proprietary software world.
Maybe you should think before clicking 'submit' next time.
Legally and economically, I agree with you completely.
But unless the person is doing something illegal or blatantly against the rules, I don't think it's in their best interest to fire such a high profile employee. The drop in overall employee morale will probably cost them a lot more than keeping the guy on, and the public perception that they need to fire the founder to stay afloat will probably hurt them even more.
Maybe not
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.
Horseshit. Forking is a natural occurance in FOSS. Survival of the fitest and all. If Gael can pull off something that is better then that will be Mandriva's loss. If he can't, then that is Gael's loss. Either way the community is better off with more choices not less.
AFAIK, Gentoo compiles "everything" when you install it. So how is it possible to get a complete install in under 40 minutes?