Last Thursday, at least four Mandriva employees received the news that their contract will be stopped next month. All of them are people who are very active in the Mandriva community, and sometimes maintainer of important packages (such as Apache). There has not been much more explanation about this decision. This gives the news last week that Mandriva wants more involvement of the community (read: people who are not payed) another dimension to me… :-(
Oh well, we’ll have to wait to see if this will impact development much. But it’s never a good sign that people have to leave a company.
Update 21 May 2007: It seems that the list referred to in the above posting in not completely correct. Currently a lot of rumours are going around, even on Mandriva’s official IRC channels, and even between current Mandriva employees. Probably more than four people are losing their job, but it seems not even Mandriva employees themselves know exactly who is concerned. The communication clearly has been catastrophic, and this is severely damaging Mandriva’s image :-(
Update 22 May 2007:To get a more complete picture of the problems, please also read Dvalin’s blog post.
Noooo… not another “Gaël” episode… :(
Sorry to say that but Gael was kind of useless, he wasn’t working on anything technical and his involvement with the community was…well I never saw him on a ml. The departure of Per and Wolfgang has a real impact, just when David Barth say he wants to involve the community he cuts his ties with it.