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 the first opportunity. What are the reasons why I've been fired? Without entering into details, I guess that my relationship with the current Mandriva CEO (and soon President of the Board) which hasn't always 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 and 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 Club cash-flow ever. But it wasn't the "fashionable" 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 releasing 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 hand, 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 to find a publisher.

Long life to Linux and to Free Software!

Gaël.