Mandriva fires founder Gael Duval

Gael Duval, one of the founders of Mandriva, was fired by his own company as part of a set of cost-cutting measures, designed to help the company recover from its current financial losses. Duval had voluntarily moved to a new branch of the company which was planning to improve its open source community involvement, while the company as a whole has been turning increasingly towards "enterprise" applications, hoping to compete with Red Hat and Novell SuSE, among others. NewsForge reports that Duval intends to sue the company for "abusive layoff", but Mandriva CEO Francois Bancilhon mildly described the decision as part of cost-cutting measures. It remains unclear what the company's next moves will be, as it will face serious competition in the enterprise Linux market sector.