So, that's it, warly is gone (from Mandriva).

Tonight, we had his departure party, which was really nice, it's probably the best celebration we have done for months: almost all the company was here, even sage gurus and missed co-workers that left the company came back to "celebrate" the event with us.

warly prepared a lot of food and drinks (actually more than reasonable), and his most dedicated right hand men baked some nice (well, maybe not so nice for mine) delicacies. Too bad everybody was frightened to open the surströmming we've kept growing for years now (thanks oden!).

As usual, it was also a lot of fun! We even played DDR, thanks to the Gaming DVD I prepared earlier for the Club. It has been a bit tricky to get additionnal (non-free) songs, but we managed to do it, live. Congratulations to leeloo who defeated me and most of the people more than we would have hopped! Sylvie is still an awesome competitor as well :-p

Still, it's sad to imagine that next week I won't see warly again in front of my desk, while he has been my boss for more or less 3 years. I think all the company will miss him, both professionally and personally.

He has often been blamed (by contributors, co-workers) for many things. But if we have a look at the big long-term picture, his decisions were quite always sensible, and he helped us by making compromises. warly was sort of our super-jack-bauer guy :-)

We used to rely a lot on him, probably too much, and it will be different (not to say hard) to prepare the next Mandriva release without him. warly has done a lot in his final weeks at Mandriva to share his knowledge, explain his projects, and distribute his workload among co-workers, so it's up to us now. Though, don't worry too much, we will all work hard(er) to build an amazing realease, with more features, a stable core basesystem, and neat artwork.

I'd like to thank warly for all the things he did for Mandriva, and me in particular. I owe my job pretty much to him (and Fred), and he has always been a brilliant leader, very valuable, strong, wise, understanding (and weird enough for us :-p).

We had great moments together: roller rides, strange culinary artistic experiences (some would say experimentations), trips abroad, enjoying reads, and much more... His departure does not make our friendship over, and I guess we will have a lot of occasions to outperform all that :-)

Well, good bye dear manager dude, the family will miss you.