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Mandriva Linux Was Allegedly Brought Down By Employee Lawsuits

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  • Mandriva Linux Was Allegedly Brought Down By Employee Lawsuits

    Phoronix: Mandriva Linux Was Allegedly Brought Down By Employee Lawsuits

    While the popularity of Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) has been fading in recent years, it turns out the CEO of Mandriva is blaming employee lawsuits and the France legal system on the company's demise...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    I wonder what the lawsuits were based on. Just for laying them off...?

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    • #3
      People deserve their salary, they have to eat, pay bills etc. If a company cannot pay, it shouldn't expect people to work out of charity, it doesn't work that way.

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      • #4
        I think the news here is that Mandriva had revenue which was in the range of "thousands of euros". How do distros like Mandriva make money? I understand Canonical making money, but Mandriva is a distro mostly used by people who know what they are doing with their PCs, so there isn't much support to be sold. Other users don't know it even exists.

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        • #5
          of course it is always somebody else's fault. Never the managment fucking up for over a decade.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by computerquip View Post
            I wonder what the lawsuits were based on. Just for laying them off...?

            (Most? Some?) European countries have strict rules for layoffs.

            I don't know about France, but for example in Germany, you can't just give 2 weeks notice and that's it. There must be a reason (and that reason must be allowed by law), and the employer has to follow some rules when deciding which employee gets laid off. The social background must be taken into account for example. It's not uncommon to sue an employer after getting laid off, and then the employer might be forced to re-hire you (and pay in retrospect), or you get some compensation for the illegal layoff.

            So if Mandriva needed to save costs through layoffs, they should have made sure to comply with local laws. Apparently they didn't, otherwise they wouldn't have to pay their ex-employees "hundreds of thousands of Euros".

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            • #7
              Originally posted by eydee View Post
              People deserve their salary, they have to eat, pay bills etc. If a company cannot pay, it shouldn't expect people to work out of charity, it doesn't work that way.

              Sure... if they're currently working for the company. If the company isn't profitable, I don't understand how it's not reasonable to lay people off. Rather, it would be unreasonable not to do so.

              In this case, even *more* people are laid off. It doesn't seem like anyone won in the long term.

              EDIT: If they failed to adhere to standards when laying the employees off, then that's understandable. But at the same time, it's kinda like how you can pay a lawyer here in the US to get out of virtually any traffic ticket, no matter how obvious the offense is.
              Last edited by computerquip; 29 May 2015, 08:24 PM.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by computerquip View Post

                But at the same time, it's kinda like how you can pay a lawyer here in the US to get out of virtually any traffic ticket, no matter how obvious the offense is.
                excuse me, I worked for a law enforcement agency here in New York and I can tell you. You cannot pay off a lawyer to get out of anything when it comes to traffic tickets. A violation is a violation and the most that a lawyer can do, no matter how good, is perhaps bring down the violation to be less than what you are being charged with. So the accusatory instrument could say you were speeding 30 miles over the speed limit, and a judge may consider circumstances of the situation with the lawyer's help and bring it down to something more along the lines of "disobeyed traffic control device" which is something much lighter than a speeding ticket and more generic.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by kurkosdr View Post
                  I think the news here is that Mandriva had revenue which was in the range of "thousands of euros". How do distros like Mandriva make money?
                  Maybe the "European approach"*, divide and conquer sales pitch played with some people. Mandriva SA's lack of a compelling value proposition made it abundantly clear they were in over their heads.

                  *an attitude which seemed to dismiss the fact that SUSE and Canonical are headquartered in Europe as well, and that the constituent software of Linux distributions more often than not is the product of collaboration on a global scale, and that the code is auditable regardless of the vendors' countries of origin

                  Originally posted by Julie Bort
                  http://www.businessinsider.com/ceo-e...andriva-2015-5

                  "As we previously reported, after 17 years of duking it out with Microsoft Windows with some success, the French company Mandriva just shuttered its doors and liquidated its assets."
                  Sure, sure. Success here being measured in the thousands. By that measure, AmigaOS has probably been successful in "duking it out" with Windows.

                  Sadly, the Conectiva brand, or even the Lycoris brand, is probably a more attractive asset than the Mandriva/Mandrakesoft brand itself at this point. Product-wise, someone might be interested in Pulse.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by kurkosdr View Post
                    I think the news here is that Mandriva had revenue which was in the range of "thousands of euros". How do distros like Mandriva make money? I understand Canonical making money, but Mandriva is a distro mostly used by people who know what they are doing with their PCs, so there isn't much support to be sold. Other users don't know it even exists.
                    Before Ubuntu, Mandriva was actually one of the primary newbie distros. (It was known as Mandrake back then)

                    So Mandriva wasn't just some random amateur distro - they were legitimately trying to compete with the other big guns, like SUSE, at least for local European sales.

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