SPIRO-Linux creator, Rick Collette, leaves Inventive Communications
Feb 25th, 20:55 UTC
For immediate release Feb. 25, 2000
Today, Rick Collette, the primary developer and creator of the SPIRO-Linux distribution, resigned from Inventive Communications.
This morning I have a conversation with Rick Collette that
outlined the details of his departure from Inventive
Communications:
"Some people say that when prayer was removed
from the schools, the school system started to degrade. The
direction that Inventive Communications was taking with
SPIRO-Linux could be likened to removing prayer from the schools.
What I mean by that is that the level of commercialization and
the amount of marketing dollars that were going into promoting
a cardboard box, that I felt should have been going into the
development of the product itself, is ridiculous." - Rick
He continues with: "They (Inventive Communications) promised me the
funding for the development team that would make SPIRO-Linux a
reality, along with the marketing and business backing to take
on the big guys. After providing them with heart and soul, eighty
hour work weeks, missing all the cool things my kid did while I
was working, they give me a marketing juggernaut and one developer
with a whopping week of experience in Linux. This probably sounds
pretty bitter, and I guess I am.. a little.. but I have some
things in the works, and in the meantime I'll be providing my
services as a consultant to a communications company. So I guess
everything is going to work out for the best anyway." -Rick
I asked him a few questions:
M: "What are the plans in the works?"
R: "I promised Mr. Denton over at geeknews.org that I would give
him the lowdown on the new projects, but I will say be on the
lookout for the deeplinux.com website."
M: "What will become of SPIRO-Linux?"
R: "I'm really not at liberty to discuss or make predictions about
what Inventive Communications may do with SPIRO-Linux. I really
genuinely hope that they will continue with SPIRO-Linux, It is
after all my baby."
M: "In the interview that you did with geeknews.org, you sounded
pretty positive about the direction of SPIRO-Linux, and earlier
you mentioned your distain, where did the turn happen?"
R: "I'm a programmer, not an attourney. My nature is to trust
people. When Inventive Communications offered me the contract,
I glanced over it and it looked good to me, so I signed it. I
laid all my trust that Inventive Communications would do right
by me. Later, after some thought about it, the contract really
didn't make much sense to me, so I had an attourney look at it
and his response to me was something to the effect of
'...I would have to question the ethical standing of a company
that would even attempt to slip this to anyone...' (this is not
an exact quote. I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was
something very close.) This is where everything started to turn
sour."
Rick can be contacted at rick@openshare.net
I can be contacted at madmage@bigfoot.com
(Submitted by Steve Brock of inipi.org)
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