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December 2, 2008

Mandriva, a Linux company based in France says it is permanently terminating the services of all its external contractors.

All the people that work from remote locations are affected, and there are no immediate plans that would suggest the company will change its policy anytime soon.

The decision also affects Adam Williamson, a moderator for the Mandriva community forum. Williamson figured in these columns recently, over comments he had made about Canonical, the company that is behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

On a few occasions in the past, Williamson did make intemperate comments about other Linux distributions, but some still say he has been an untiring supporter of Mandriva on many English-language forums and it is difficult to see why he has been shown the door.

Mandriva doesn't wish to have someone spreading the message that it is a worthy competitor to other well-known distributions, and has said that repeatedly in the past.

It would seem odd that when companies reduce some staff, they tend to cut people who are actually strong contributors to the core product that keeps them in business.

There has to be some details missing that would throw more light into all of this...

Mandriva is no stranger to deep financial problems. Five years ago, the company, then known as MandrakeSoft, filed for the French equivalent of Chapter 11.

It filed an application to emerge from that unfortunate state in March 2004. Its exit plan aimed to pay creditors, without recapitalisation as a pre-condition, over none less than 9 long years.

Mandriva said at the time that its turnaround was largely made possible by improvements in its financial results, having recorded its first profitable quarter since 1999.

Trading was resumed on the Euronext and the U.S. OTC market and new capital was then raised from a subscription offering.

Among the many different Linux distributions which have an European heritage, OpenSUSE and Mandriva were the two best known. OpenSUSE is probably the number one now, at least in Europe.

With its acquisition by Novell in 2003, and once OpenSUSE fell into American hands, there was a gap opened for Mandriva to fill on the European continent, and Mandriva realized that pretty fast.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the next year, given the current state of financial instability across the globe in the past two months.

Source: Mandriva.

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