Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Wednesday 10 December 2008, 8:28 AM
Mandriva fires Adam Williamson
Adam has been a visible, helpful, and extremely knowledgeable resource at Mandriva. He has commented on a number of my blog posts about Linux in general and Mandriva in particular, and his advice was invariably useful.
The new CEO says in The Official Mandriva Blog:
Once we are through this arduous passage, we plan to re-think and reinforce the Community template.
This seems a bit odd to me - certainly the most important resource you can have for this area is intelligent and competent staff, so you are not exactly positioning yourself for the future by dumping one of the best there is. The CEO closes by saying:
Dear Friends, Mandriva may have caught flu but is alive and very much kicking.
It looks to me like the "flu" has fogged their brains, and the only thing they are "kicking" is some of their most valuable staff.
I have always kept Mandriva as one of the Linux partitions on my laptops. Hmmm, two of the partitions, actually, as I have the KDE version on my S6510, and the Gnome version on my S2110. In fact, I had wondered why I didn't hear from Adam after posting recently about problems getting the KDE Live CD to boot on the S2110.
As a result of these changes at Mandriva, I am going to drop both of those partitions. To be honest, I have found Mandriva to be consistently more difficult to work with than some of the other Linux distributions, and I kept it primarily because of Adam's good advice when things didn't seem to work properly. Without him there, it is simply not worth the trouble.
Starting today, I will replace Mandrive on the S6510 with VectorLinux, and on the S2110 with openSuSE.
jw 10/12/2008
PreviousComments on this post
Adam Williamson's supporters speak of how highly visible he was as a Mandriva roadie, yet those supporters turn a blind eye to Williamson's very petty and public spit at Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth. For all we know, Williamson's tactless kvetching might just have been the tip of an iceberg.
Could be that Mandriva's new CEO tossed out an apple gone bad.
:(
Thanks, Gnothi, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas too. I'd like you to suggest what was petty (or, for that matter, particularly 'public', it was a post on my personal blog) about my detailed argument as to why Canonical has a negative effect on the variety of the Linux distribution gene pool.
Thanks for the kind post, Jamie. Got any jobs going? :)
@Gnothi - Adam's "visibility" didn't matter to me, what made him significant and valuable was the fact he obviously knew what he was talking about, his advice and suggestions were always clear, concise and correct, and he put a lot of effort into what he did. The breadth of places he posted, including my dinky little blog here, was quite amazing. That's an excellent way to motivate and support people to not only use a specific Linux distribution, but also to recommend it to others. I saw the blog post you refer to, and I also do not find it to be a "petty public spit". It is something that needs to be thought about - how long can one person continue to dump large amounts of money into Linux distribution, what is the effect of that on the overall market, and my personal favorite, which Adam didn't specifically mention, what happens if/when that person has to or chooses to stop doing so?
@AdamW - Unfortunately not - and I may be joining you in the search before too long! :(
I am just a simple very long time Linux user (slackware based). I have to say that I have never tried Ubuntu, or Mandriva, but I appreciate Adam's participation in this forum, always helpful, he gave me confidence in his distribution and I was planning in trying Mandriva very shortly. Now Mandriva is definitely out of my list, just as Ubuntu has always been.
Adam Williamson's blog "Why I Don't Like Canonical" is an exercise in hateful misinformation, i.e. FUD.
For example, Williamson says, "I've read a figure suggesting it has cost Mr. Shuttleworth personally $10m over the last four years, suggesting annual losses of approximately $2.5m". The truth is that Mark Shuttleworth has placed $10-million into a public trust called the Ubuntu Foundation. These trust funds are NOT used for the day-to-day operation of Ubuntu, which is bankrolled by Canonical's venture capital. The $10-million trust fund will come into play only if Canonical can no longer support Ubuntu. Shuttleworth calls the fund a "safety net". Ubuntu Community Council member Colin Watson refers to the $10-million as "rainy day funds."
Despite Williamson's sour grapes, ubiquitous Ubuntu is in fact raising desktop Linux to new heights of integration and deployment. Happily, Canonical reports that "revenue growth is extremely strong and we're bullish across the board both at server side and desktop."
Gnothi, I'm going to proceed to ignore you now. You're clearly not interested in reasonable conversation, so there's no point.
InAction Man: well, whether or not I'm being paid by Mandriva-the-company I'm a firm supporter of Mandriva-the-distribution, so I'd hate to see a procedural issue with the former stop you trying the latter. :) For what it's worth, regardless of my status, I encourage you to try out Mandriva, still. I'll be continuing to support the project as long as I have the time to, just as I did before I worked for the company.
I wish you the best of luck, Adam. I have ran Mandrake/Mandriva since 2001 and always found solutions to problems on their forums, many coming from yourself for the past few years. Mandriva has always been one of the top innovators in desktop Linux, and your presence will be missed. Good luck and God bless.
Well, here's my new plan. :)
http://www.happyassassin.net/2009/01/01/project-sellout-proceeds-apace/
