Prokofy Neva broke a story on November 3rd that Oskar Linden had been fired. SLUniverse had a thread regarding rumours that Oskar had been fired. NowLinden’s don’t comment on departures, ever. I’ve been to office hours before where people ask a Linden whether someone has been fired, and they never tell you!
Now, I don’t know if Oskar has been fired, but a couple of things here, love him or loathe him, Prok generally doesn’t post malicious rumours. I can’t see Prok making a post like that without having investigated the issue and spoken to sources.
In the SLUniverse thread, Jessica Lyon of Phoenix viewer development fame pretty much confirms that Oskar is no longer working for Linden Lab and that Oskar was surprised to have lost his job.
I’m always disappointed when we lose a Linden, I can’t recall a single Linden whom I’ve been happy to see go, and that includes Daniel, whom got a bad press over putting his name to an infamous blog post in the past. I mean I’m not saying I think they were all the bees knees, but they play their part and do their best and even when I’m critical of them, I respect them. The thing is, I admired Oskar.
I like someone who is forthright, which Oskar was. I respect someone who lays down boundaries, which Oskar did, he even changed his signature to bascially tell people to stop posting unrelated issues in his server development threads. Life isn’t all about being nicey nicey with each other, it would be better if it were, but the reality is, it isn’t. So sometimes people need to be a bit of a git, show some strong traits and cut to the chase, Oskar would do that.
This doesn’t mean to say that I agreed with everything Oskar did, but at least with Oskar, I knew where he stood, there was no sitting on the fence on issues he could answer. Oskar would respond in forum threads, something which very few Linden’s do these days, he would respond to Jira issues, back in the day when we could comment on Jira issues, he would sometimes sound grumpy and display poor customer relations skills on the surface, but underneath the surface he was actually displaying good customer service skills because he was telling people how the land lay. I mean you wouldn’t find this approach in a good guide to customer service manual, but being blunt with people does make a position clear.
Now Linden Lab don’t communicate well and as I said earlier, they don’t really talk about staffing changes, so we don’t know whom the new Oskar will be yet, but losing Oskar is disappointing and I wish him all the best in the future and would like to thank him for his contributions.
News actually broke at the Simulator User Group on Friday November 2nd.
Precise details weren’t clear at the time, but I covered it in my week 44/4 update. It’s sad & disappointing.
Ack, I didn’t notice you had a two page post up (despite your please use page numbers advice)! Yes the rumours look to have started on Friday and the issue came up at Andrew Linden’s office hour, Rex posted this at SLU and on Prok’s blog.
Yeah. I was at the meeting, as was Rex, when a comment was passed in open chat. I did a quick follow-up (as best as could be done given Linden staff cannot comment under the company’s policy), and opted to go with something low-key because there still was some degree of uncertainty (and still is) over the precise reason for”letting him go”, to use the horrible business-speak term.