Mandriva fires Adam Williamson

Mandriva has been struggling recently, to say the least, and they brought on a new CEO a month or so ago. Apparently one of the first things that CEO did was fire Adam Williamson, their Community Manager.

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