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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.

4 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. 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.
  3. 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