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spinynorman

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  4. Farewell to the creator

    in Everything Linux

    Posted

    Interview of François Bancilhon, CEO of Mandriva, posted on club.mandriva.com -

     

    Many news have been circulating over the web concerning Gael Duval's departure from Mandriva. Users and community members are concerned by the lay off of a key founder and would like to understand what happened and what is the impact.

     

    So let us start with the Gael situation: did you fire Gael?

    Gael was not fired. This term would imply something wrong on his part, which was not the case. He was laid off.

     

    Why was he laid off?

    The company lost money in the October-December 2005 quarter. This means that we spent more money that we generated. We can do this temporarily, because we have cash in the bank, but doing this over a long period of time would permanently damage the company. So we had to make the reasonable but hard decision to cut expenses. The expenses cuts were done in a way we estimate will not keep us from generating revenue. Everyone works very hard at Mandriva and fulfills a useful task. So, when you have to cut, it means you need to cut people who were doing a good job and a useful one, so it is painful for everyone, but you have to make the hard choice.

     

    Why is Gael suing the company?

    You need to ask this to Gael. France has labor laws that give strong protection to employees and make lay offs long, expensive and complicated (but not impossible). Many employees (about 1 out of 4) sue their employer after a lay off, most of the time to get the employer to pay extra cash on top of the “regular” severance package (about 5 months for people with some seniority).

     

    Was there a disagreement between Gael and the company management?

    Not that I am aware of. We had and still have within the company and the management lively debates about the strategy and its implementation. Gael was part of some of these debates, even though he was remoted. I don't think we agreed on everything, but I never got the impression we had fundamental disagreements. I've always valued his opinion, and I still do.

     

    Gael mentions a new project, Ulteo. Were you aware of it?

    Yes indeed. Gael brought this to me about a year ago I think (I might be wrong on the date). I looked at it carefully, we discussed it for some time with Gael and Jacques Le Marois. Our joint conclusion was that it would make more sense in a separate entity, which would have a partnership with Mandriva. I started looking for someone who could help Gael on this project on the business side and found a potential candidate. Then Gael came back and said he wanted to work further on the technology before discussing this and we left it there.

     

    Let us now turn to the company strategy: is Gael's departure a sign of a shift in strategy?

    Absolutely not. We believe the current strategy is sound.

     

    So let us try to understand that strategy better. Many users have a hard time understanding your strategy and finding their way in your product offering. Are you aware of this?

    Yes, we need to make our story more readable, we have some action in process to improve that situation.

     

    So help up clarify it: who are the target customers of Mandriva?

    We have two quite different targets: individual users and organizations. For these two targets, we have different products and offering, different sales channels and different strategies. As we move forward, we will try to distinguish more the organizations taking care of both segments.

    The individual users made the original target users of the company, this is what MandrakeSoft was servicing, and we have a large numbers of individual users worldwide. We are fully committed to these users and to delivering exciting technology to them. We address them through retail stores and distributors worldwide, through e-commerce, through the club and through OEM agreements with large hardware vendors such as HP, Dell, IBM or NEC and local players such as Positivo in Brazil. The products are Free Mandriva, Discovery, PowerPack and PowerPack+ and the key service is Mandriva On Line. For these users, we have recently announced Mandriva One and Mandriva Kiosk, from which we expect a lot. We are committed to our individual users. A large part of the Mandriva team is dedicated to the individual user market both in terms of engineering, services, marketing and communication.

    About 3 years ago, we announced our decision to start developing a new business line for organizations (enterprises and government agencies). Thus we have put in place a new product line (Corporate Server and Corporate Desktop), we have put in place a consulting, training and support organization. We address this market essentially through our direct sales organization in France, Brazil and the US. We have announced for this market the new administration tool, Pulse and put in place our Corporate Club offer. We also offer specialized and embedded services.

     

    Is one of these targets being developed at the expense of the other?

    I don't think so, I believe on the contrary that they complement each other: they have some common r&d investment in the kernel and on hardware certification. We also find often that they feed each other: some individual users have learned about Mandriva from their enterprise and in many enterprise sales situations, we are meeting some of our individual users.

     

    Is Mandriva going away from providing a free version of its products?

    There is continuous rumor that we want to depart from the open source model, that we want to charge for things that were free, that we want to drop individual customers. So let me restate what I have said many times: First, everything we develop and distribute is distributed under GPL. Second, we remain committed to provide a complete free distro (Free Mandriva and soon Mandriva One) and to make its update free.

    However, and we've always been clear on this, we want to be profitable, so we need to generate revenues. We do this by providing, besides the free products some commercial products and some services that we charge for. As we provide more technology and products, we try to bring both more free stuff and more commercial stuff.

    For instance, in the new Mandriva One + Kiosk offering, there is free stuff (Mandriva One) and stuff we will charge for, or make part of the Club (Kiosk). Look back at the three past years: we have never turned a free product or service into something we charge for. I'm not asking anyone to just take my word, I just say: please look at our track record.

     

    People get the sense that some of your products are free, but that you want to charge for updates. Do you charge for updates?

    We do not: for Free Mandriva, Mandriva One, Discovery, Power Pack and Power Pack+, updates are freely available and provided by us. We provide on top of this Mandriva On Line, which is a service that makes the updates easier: an icon on your desktop gives you the status (green you're up to date, red you're not), when the icon is red, you can ask for update by a simple click. We charge 20€ annually for this service. What you pay is the ease of use, not the updates.

     

    What is Mandriva One?

    Mandriva One is a Mandriva 2006-based distro, which holds on a single CD and which is both live and install. It's coming out any day now. It will first go to club members (because we like to give them an advance peek at things), then it will be free for all.

     

    What is Mandriva Kiosk?

    We have found that non technical users find it difficult sometimes to install new products and new versions of products. So the Kiosk is a response to this. The Kiosk will have a library of Bundles (a bundle is a set of RPMs that make a consistent application) and downloading and installing a bundle is done in a single click. Kiosk will be available as a paid service and will be free for Club Members silver and above.

     

    Are you a company out to make profits?

    Yes absolutely; our goal is to be profitable and growing so that we can develop great products, provide great services, and pay our employees. There is however one important difference with an ordinary company: in a standard company, you have to keep happy your customers, your employees and your shareholders. We do this at Mandriva, but we also have to keep happy our contributors, the community and our “free” users.

  5. Farewell to the creator

    in Everything Linux

    Posted

    Thanks, solarian. My mistake.

     

    I'll leave the interview posted in any case, just remove the reference to dexter11... :)

     

    Edit: the English translation of the blog is there intermittently - it may still be amended but this is a copy of what was there...

     

    Fired, simply fired.

     

    Fired. Yes. Simply fired, for economical reasons, along with a few other ones. More than 7 years after I created Mandrake-Linux and then Mandrakesoft, the current boss of Mandriva "thanks me" and I'm leaving, sad, with my two-month salary indemnity standard package. It's difficult to accept that back in 1998 I created my job and the one of many other people, and that recently, on a February afternoon, Mandriva's CEO called to tell me that I was leaving.

     

    Bad mood, yes. For two reasons: it's a pity that Mandriva still needs to fire people since we had put the company break-even in 2003/2004 et that it was decided that it should keep on that way. The second reason of course is that I'm part of this lay-off. Hard to swallow.

     

    Obviously, I should have expected to be fired since my recent switch of activity at Mandriva certainly fragilized my position, so I could be thanked at first opportunity. What are the reasons why I've been fired? Without entering into details, I guess that my relationship with the current CEO (and soon President of the Board) which hasn't been excellent, has been a factor. But I didn't think he would do that.

     

    Back in 2005, under his pressure, I stopped my activity as the head of the Communication Department. At the same time I was happy to leave this mission which was extremely difficult to handle with a no-budget, and was pleased to have initiated and finished the big corporate website reorganization which is providing a more professional image to Mandriva.

     

    So, we agreed on my suggestion to create a new role at Mandriva: a "Community Department" which was intended to improve Mandriva's image inside the Linux and IT community. This new mission was announced by my CEO as an "essential ingredient" to the future success of Mandriva.

     

    A few days ago I was suprised to learn that I was part of the « redundancies expenses judged to be non-essential »

     

    So it seems that it's not needed anymore to work on the future or to launch new projects like I did so many times these past years (new ergonomy for Mandriva Linux, Mandrake Move...).

     

    Actually, I've always supported the idea that Mandriva's userbase was the heaviest pillar on which Mandriva could rely, and that the best way to do some business was certainly to extend this userbase at the max and then to sell value-added services to a small portion of it. I've always been defending this position at Mandriva, which implied the idea to release better quality products and to value our image inside the IT and Open Source community, because the community recommends, or not, Linux products. This approach gained its better results when I wrote myself the webpage contents which encouraged people to subscribe the Mandriva Club: this has generated the biggest cash-flow ever. But it wasn't the main policy at Mandriva. And the fact that the "community department" has just been canceled is, in my opinion, very meaningful about the current policy.

     

    I don't know where the company is going. My feeling is that they are focusing more and more on the corporate market. Mandriva is more and more looking like a standard company, which is trying to sell services to fortune 500 companies, abandoning its initial roots. But at the same time, it's keeping on released geeks products. This sounds like a fuzzy strategy, made from, in my opinion, the concatenation of current opportunities.

     

    So it's the end of the Mandrake/Mandriva venture for me. I'm just going to sue Mandriva for abusive lay-off, since I doubt that the real reason was economical for me. I have the very bad feeling that my initial project has been wasted and this sentiment is reinforced since I have alerted my president twice in 2005 about the bad trend in the management and business.

     

    Nevertheless, I will try to remember the good time in priority. I also want to testify of my sympathy and recognition to all the developers and contributors who are building the Mandriva Linux distribution. They all deserve admiration. Keep on the good work, guys!

     

    Now it's time for me to think about the future. I'm certainly going to launch new projects with the ambition that they could ideally change the world, or at least the way people use computers, while providing a living to me, my wife and my little daughter.

     

    I've been working for one year during lost hours on a new project of Open-Source operating system called "Ulteo" (the concept has been proposed to Mandriva at the end of 2004, but not "selected"). I hope that I can launch a first version of the product in the next weeks. If this concept can prove itself to be valid, it could imply an important change in how people are using Linux in particular and operating-systems in general. Check contents and subscribe at http://www.ulteo.com if you want to learn more in the future.

     

    On the other, in a very different domain, if you plan to send civil and semi-autonomous drones to the other side of the earth (by water, ground or air), I'd be highly interested to participate and work in this area as well!

     

    Last but not least, it's likely that a book about Mandriva/Mandriva will be released eventually. I just have to finish it and find a publisher.

     

    Long life to Linux and Free Software!

     

     

    Gaël.

  6. Farewell to the creator

    in Everything Linux

    Posted

    This is the text of the NewsForge interview for ease of reference:

     

    Mandriva executive Gael Duval today confirmed rumors that he was laid off from the company he co-founded, along with a number of other Mandriva employees. Duval told NewsForge that he is going to bring suit against Mandriva for "abusive layoff."

     

    In an exclusive IRC chat this afternoon, Duval said, "I'm very sad since my new role was pretty exciting. Additionally, seven years ago I created my job and some jobs for many other people, and eventually someone, the current boss, tells me, 'Now you leave.' Ouch!"

     

    Duval said that last year Mandriva CEO Francois Bancilhon asked him to leave the company. Instead, Duval agreed to move from his long-time position as vice president of communication to head a new "community department" intended "to improve Mandriva's image in the open source arena." Now the company has terminated that effort.

     

    He also said that while he and Bancilhon had "diverging opinions" on corporate direction, there was no animosity between the two. We asked Bancilhon about the situation, and he responded this morning, writing:

     

    We announced on March 7 the financial results for Q1 2005-2006 (October-December 2005) and explained the disappointing results of the company and the actions we are taking to fix the situation: cost reduction (including workforce reduction) and new commercial initiatives, both on individual solutions and on enterprise solutions. Gael is part of the positions in the company we have chosen to eliminate. Gael has brought a lot to this company and has been all along a very strong contributor. I am very sorry to see him leave, together with other employees that have worked hard and done their best for Mandriva. We are just at a stage where we need to make difficult decision to improve the company status.

     

    So, to answer your questions, Gael has indeed left the company as part of cost reduction plan implemented this quarter.

     

    Mandriva remains committed to its mission: bring Linux and open source technology to both individuals and organisations.

     

    Duval created Linux-Mandrake in 1998, announcing it on Slashdot.org and elsewhere. The original Mandrake was based on Red Hat Linux and featured a KDE desktop. Mandrake became known as being the easiest-to-use version of Linux. The company flirted with bankruptcy in 2001, but kept hanging on. In 2005, Mandrake merged with Connectiva in an effort by the two distributions to bulk-up against the larger Red Hat and Novell.

     

    Of the company's financial pains, Duval said, "My opinion is that the loss is due to the increase of expenses: many people have been hired in 2005 and early 2006.... As far as I know, none of the new employees have been fired." He agreed with a suggestion that the company was undergoing "a changing of the guard."

     

    Duval didn't speculate on Mandriva's future. "On the first hand, there is some business (management decisions and expenses are another story). On the other hand, I frankly don't know where the company is going.... It seems that the company is going to address the corporate market more and more.... My opinion is that we should have stuck to the roots (individuals and SOHO)."

     

    Duval's future plans -- in addition to the lawsuit -- involve a new open source project called Ulteo. According to Duval, "This project was proposed to Mandriva but not 'selected.' My goal is to provide a new way for people to use operating systems, so they can really concentrate on using it (and not maintaining it)." He also noted that he has received many messages of support from the community.

  9. URPMI Now Broken [solved]

    in Command Line, Kernel and Programming

    Posted

    You shouldn't need to reinstall. :)

     

    Try this in a terminal:

     

    su
[root password]
rm -f /var/lib/urpmi/.LOCK
rm -f /var/lib/urpmi/.RPMLOCK

     

    If it doesn't work straightaway, try a reboot...

     

    If you have a problem with a server when using urpmi, don't just close the terminal: use CTRL & C to abandon the process, and choose a different server.

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