RadeonHD Driver Takes A Blow In Novell Layoffs

Due to the tough economic conditions around the world, Novell last month began slashing some of their workforce. With that reduction, a good percentage of the paid OpenSuSE developers were laid off. As a major blow to the development of the open-source ATI graphics stack, one of the key RadeonHD driver developers has been lost. The key xf86-video-radeonhd developers from the start of this driver have been Luc Verhaegen, Matthias Hopf, and Egbert Eich. Well, there are now just two key Novell developers left working on the RadeonHD project.

Luc Verhaegen has been let go from Novell. As was publicly announced this morning in the form of a Git commit, Luc Verhaegen is no longer working for Novell. While he was one of the few X developers working on OpenSuSE and also responsible for the VIA Unichrome driver, Novell decide to eliminate him. Due to limited access now to ATI hardware, it's unlikely that we will see any future work from him in the RadeonHD driver.

Besides his coding, Luc also was critical to the organization and success of the the X.Org development room at FOSDEM. With Luc no longer working for OpenSuSE and possibly not even contributing to X.Org again, X@FOSDEM could be in serious jeopardy.

Best of luck to Luc Verhaegen and his future endeavors. The RadeonHD driver is now at a loss.