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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
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.
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.
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
France, where Mandrake was based and where his employment contract was signed, is not a state of the United States of America.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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?
As you may be aware, there are other countries with their own laws. Mandriva being based in France, which has laws to protect employees against abusive (ie, not motivated by repetitive mistakes of the employee, and a bunch of other factors) layoffs, Gael can sue Mandriva. Then some particular kind of judges (called "juges des prud'hommes") will decide if it's ok or not, and of course, if it's not, they won't force him back into Mandriva, but Mandriva may have to give some indemnities.
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.
"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.
France, where Mandrake was based and where his employment contract was signed, is not a state of the United States of America.
A regrettable oversight. We'll get to you guys once we're done with Iran.
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.
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."
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
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 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
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"
AFAIK, Gentoo compiles "everything" when you install it. So how is it possible to get a complete install in under 40 minutes?