Mandriva Club: Interview of François Bancilhon, CEO of Mandriva

“Many news have been circulating over the web concerning Gael
Duval’s departure from Mandriva. Users and community members are
concerned by the lay off of a key founder and would like to
understand what happened and what is the impact. So let us start
with the Gael situation: did you fire Gael?

“Gael was not fired. This term would imply something wrong on
his part, which was not the case. He was laid off.

“Why was he laid off?

“The company lost money in the October-December 2005 quarter.
This means that we spent more money that we generated. We can do
this temporarily, because we have cash in the bank, but doing this
over a long period of time would permanently damage the company. So
we had to make the reasonable but hard decision to cut
expenses…”

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