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Mandriva Fires Founder Gael Duval, Who Plans to Sue

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the commercialism-trumps-community-once-again dept.

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.

14 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. This is truly a sad day by Winckle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:This is truly a sad day by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I've tried out Mandrake/Mandriva a number of times in the past. (I even did a review on version 10 here.) While they gained a lot of good will for being "user friendly", I always found them to be not worth the effort. The desktop feels nice and all, but the system always had some sort of problems that could never quite be resolved. It's hard to say why Mandrake always was so difficult to work with, but if I were to take a guess, I'd point a finger at their bleeding edge software. They are infamous for always packing in the latest and greatest. That same bleeding edge mentality is what got them in trouble with version 9.2.

      Bye bye, CD Drive.

      --
      Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
    2. Re:This is truly a sad day by Vrejakti · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This isn't the first time that a founder of a Linux distribution has left the project or taken a lessor role, but it certainly is surprising how the founder of the distribution was forced to leave.

      Back in 2003 when I bought my cutting edge PC hardware, I was having little luck getting into the Linux world. I was a noob, with poorly supported hardware in Linux. Specifically a ICHR5 S-ATA controller on my ASUS motherboard. Slackware failed to boot, Fedora Core failed to boot, as did Debian. One distro did work however, and that was Mandrake. To this day Mandrake has had the best support for my hardware, with a consistently easy set up process. However, it was never the right distro for me.

      When I finally got Fedora Core working I noticed many improvements over Mandrake. It just had a feel like it was more polished, more professional. Shortly after getting used to Fedora, I dropped it for Gentoo, and I've never looked back. ^_^

      Any who, I hope Gael Duval gets things settled with Mandrake. It was his company, surely they should let him go on far better terms!

      PS. This post doesn't have a point, but please feel free to mod me Underrated or Interesting. :-D

      --
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    3. Re:This is truly a sad day by Wylfing · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

      I've been a Mandriva Club silver-level member for 2.5 years now, and I'm going to let my membership lapse in a few weeks. I downloaded the Ubuntu appliance from VMWare a while ago, and it is far superior to Mandriva for ease-of-use, ease-of-administration. I'm just waiting for the next version of Ubuntu in April to dump Mandriva from my desktop.

      I will echo that. I paid for my Mandrake Club and support contracts in my day. At the time (a few years ago) it was really the best out there for usability. There was always something they didn't get right, but less so than anyone else. But these days I run Ubuntu on the desktop and straight-dope Debian on the server. I was blown away by how well Ubuntu worked out of the box. Networking, including wireless, graphics, sound, everything just worked. (In all fairness, I did have to tweak xorg.conf one time to get the uberhigh screen resolutions I wanted, but that's it.)

      Now, all that said, I did highly value Mandrake in its day. Obviously, since I paid for it for 2 years. They vanguarded things like doing a gamer edition, which is something someone should revisit, seeing how good Cedega is at Windows games these days (I've been playing Morrowind under Cedega without incident for a few weeks now). I'm sad to see them take a blow of any kind, in the same way I am sad to see Dreamcast go under and Infocom disappear.

      --
      Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
  2. Many have bailed on them already though. by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Many have bailed on them already though. by johnlenin1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      To add another anecdote: I've used Mandr[ake|iva] since v. 7, and was just about to bail on them after the "2005 LE" version. I even let my club membership lapse. I put Kubuntu "Hoary Hedgehog" on my work desktops and found it to be superior in many respects, and "Breezy" even more so.

      However, I recently tried Mandriva 2006 Free on my MythTV box at home, and it was a breeze in every respect. I was up and running hours quicker than with Kubuntu on the same machine. Mandriva also seemed more polished and stable for me, the first Mandriva distro in years that didn't regularly crash inexplicably on this computer.

      Still, too bad about Gael, though.

  3. Reminds me of Caldera by RLiegh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!

  4. He should fork it... by R2.0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:He should fork it... by weierstrass · · Score: 3, Interesting

      He should call it Mandrake.

      --
      my password really is 'stinkypants'
  5. Maybe not bad by Life700MB · · Score: 3, Interesting


    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

    1. Re:Maybe not bad by dabigpaybackski · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Maybe Gael has now the oportunity to create from zero a great new distribution without the inherents problems of Mandrake/Mandriva!

      Maybe Canonical (Ubuntu) can hire him.

      --
      "OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
  6. You gotta be kidding me. by Douglas+Simmons · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  7. Abusive Layoff by duffbeer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!"
  8. Ulteo copyright infringers? by Bogtha · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Duval's future plans -- in addition to the lawsuit -- involve a new open source project called Ulteo.

    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:

    /* mozilla.org Base Styles
    * maintained by fantasai
    * (classes defined in the Markup Guide - http://mozilla.org/contribute/writing/markup )
    */

    If you read the Mozilla.org site licensing policies, you'll see:

    The rights in the trademarks, logos, service marks of the Mozilla Foundation, as well as the look and feel of this web site, are not licensed under the Creative Commons license, and to the extent they are works of authorship (like logos and graphic design), they are not included in the work that is licensed under those terms.

    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