RadeonHD Driver Takes A Blow In Novell Layoffs

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 2 March 2009 at 09:38 AM EST. 42 Comments
RADEON
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.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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