Fired and Hired

So.. I was quite upset at once when getting laid off and seeing other people laid off too.

Now it's been a few days, I've steamed off, more details is known and less pessimistic again. :)

A week ago I was very optimistic about changes regarding Mandriva, while unfortunately some people had to be laid off, some changes allowed for things I've been wanting for a long time. These changes which made me more happy even though people gettin laid off were how Mandriva started realizing it's failure regarding many community aspects and also being forced to rely more on the community. This has been obvious to many of us both outside and within company for a looong time, finally the other part start to realize it too! One of the changes that has happened already for example is the removal of many acl restrictions preventing people to contribute to many things as well as some devels no longer acts as bottlenecks anymore, also the increased community involvement through web-discuss and on wiki has also been very cool to see happen.

For the last months I've been mainly focusing on our bachelor project where Mandriva has been our employer, this project has a deadline on friday and the our groups members has been offered positions at both Mandriva and partners like INRIA to continue working on the project. With Mandriva not being operated by millionaire playboys and still suffering from dot com bubble bursting in the past as well as not so smart decissions later, luxury salary with great benefits was of course not really expected. For the past years I've had a position at Mandriva with a quite low salary, but just enough for me to make the ends meet with a scolarship/study loan in addition. This gave me the opportunity to dedicate more time on Mandriva which I already gave a lot of time already as well as not having to find another (better;p) paying job.

While I've had better offers already that I've reject, my plans For the summer have been to spend some of the time working in Paris as I find it as an exciting opportunity to work in another country with something I have great interest in. And since I'll continue studying for a master a master degree in computer science back home after the summer, the salary isn't that important. With the trainee salary offered, my existing salary would be quite critical in addition if I were to live in Paris, so when I was told without any previous indication or explantion last week, I got quite pissed off being told this late, especially when I saw which other important people being laid off.

Remote workers such as Oden, Giuseppe (joeghi), Lenny and Wolfgang (wobo) with such great importance, especially with us being about the last persons left (especially with warly leaving earlier) in the community with importance to the community and Mandriva saying it wanted to involve the community more, this made no sense. Luckily Oden wasn't laid off after all att least.. And laying off wobo is probably even worse decission than laying off Gaël, this guy has been with the company since the beginning, doing great work and being responsible for building a great german Mandriva community. While not being very known to the rest of the world as Gaël were, he's of much greater importance to the german community doing a killer job and showing off good results. I bet what Mandriva makes of profit in Germany related to this guy is far greater than what his salary is. I sure hope management realises this and change their mind..

While I think these things has been handled in a terrible way, I think it seemed much worse with poor communication and it slipping out through a mailing list before Mandriva geting the chance to explain it's actions. Recently the new investor was announced, and I've known about it for a while, that's why these thing puzzled me a lot, we get money, still very important people get laid off, makes you really wonder what's wrong with management. At least now I know it was a bit out of it's hands with it being a demand from the new investors..

Still there's hope, and there is work being done on improving these community things greatly with great interest from Management (believe it or not!;), and the people who attended the talk/discussion I held at our room @ FOSDEM this year know what I'm talking about. :) More than ever, especially with recent incidents it's important that we value and benefit fully from our absolutely great community! I really think these things will happen now and even many of the people leaving the company will still be around with interest and involvement with the company.

Last night I was offered a better salary in new position compensating for the one I'll loose now, so no worries for me going away from our great community either.:)

I look forward to spend some time in Paris this summer! =)

Oh, one last thing, for those criticizing the distro and leaving it over this, please realize that Mandriva != Mandriva Linux, a lot of the people involved is not employeed by the company, and most of the people employeed by Mandriva and involved with the distro doesn't like these things either.. Also, while some of Mandriva's decissions are poor under such pressure, they're at least not done with evil intents..

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