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.

This is truly a sad day

[Winckle]

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.

Many have bailed on them already though.

[Lumpy]

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.

Reminds me of Caldera

[RLiegh]

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!

He should fork it...

[R2.0]

Call it TruMandriva or somesuch, and all his adherents will follow him.

Let the legal goodness commence!

Re:This is truly a sad day

[ryants]

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 [vmware.com] 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.

When I moved from Slackware to Mandrake, it was great, but Mandrake/Mandriva have not really kept up, IMHO.

Maybe not bad

[Life700MB]

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 [tinyurl.com] 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95

You gotta be kidding me.

[Douglas Simmons]

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.

Re:This is truly a sad day

[AKAImBatman]

I've tried out Mandrake/Mandriva a number of times in the past. (I even did a review on version 10 here [intelligentblogger.com].) 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. [theregister.co.uk]

An opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

I sincerely hope this does not affect the course of the distro

I sincerely hope this *does* affect the course severely. I hope Gael Duval forks the project and starts up a competitor and successfully competes with Mandriva who know longer has any idea what a community is.

Re:This is truly a sad day

[Vrejakti]

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

Re:Maybe not bad

[dabigpaybackski]

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.

Re:Many have bailed on them already though.

[johnlenin1]

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.

Re:He should fork it...

[weierstrass]

He should call it Mandrake.

Re:You gotta be kidding me.

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Well, no, not actually...you also have to abide by the Laws of the United States, and the State in which you do business. Firing someone for "poor performance or bad decision making" isn't so much a problem, though, as firing people because they are brown or black, or firing people who don't go to the "right" church.

I believe it is true (or so they taught in International Business) that in Europe it is much more difficult to fire someone, including applying for permission with the government prior to firing the person.

Abusive Layoff

[duffbeer]

Google returns effectively 1 hit for this term. Can anyone elaborate? What exactly would constitute an abusive layoff?

Ulteo copyright infringers?

[Bogtha]

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

Ulteo [ulteo.com] seem to have ripped off Mozilla.org's [mozilla.org] web design. They even use the same class names. If you view their stylesheets [ulteo.com], 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 [mozilla.org], 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.

Re:This is truly a sad day

[Colonel Angus]

I converted to Ubuntu a few weeks ago after a few failed attempts to move over to Linux. There was always *something* that kept me from keeping it. Poor sound support and other basic hardware problems were experienced with everything from Slackware to Fedora to Mandrake. So I gave up for a while.

I'd been hearing a lot of good things about Ubuntu and decided to give it a shot.

I'm impressed.

For the first time, I've installed a Linux distro where *everything* worked out of the box. There are some minor annoyances that I've encountered but the Ubuntu community is among the most helpful I've seen. There are countless Ubuntu-specific HOWTOs in Ubuntu forums. I'm thrilled to finally have this.

Kudos to the (k/edu/x)Ubuntu team for a really great product.

Re:This is truly a sad day

[Wylfing]

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.

I for one am sad

[Dollyknot]

For me computers have always been a hobby, I started out around 1983 with a TRS80 then a BBC micro, taught myself assembler, in Z80 then 6502, then I had to leave my hobby because my job as a truck driver meant I was away most of the time. Then around 1995 I came off the road and took up my old hobby again, a 286 running 3.1 then '95 then '98 then ME, finally the penny dropped.

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

Underlaying issue is revenue

[viking2000]

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?

Re:You gotta be kidding me.

[Achromatic1978]

You may be the owner of the business and the one paying the salary, but you are also asking your employee to make an investment in you and your time. For the same reason as you'd generally require them to give notice and so forth - and most contracts only allow the employer the right to pay in lieu of notice, and not for the employee to leave "at will". Not saying you shouldn't be allowed to employ who you like, as you like, but if you require a commitment from your employees, they should be able to require a commitment from you. It ain't (or shouldn't be) a one way street just because its your signature on the cheques.