Saturday, January 14th, 2023, 7:00 am
Sirius Died With the CEO’s Marriage
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A Sirius Relationship and Couple
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: It’s hardly a scandal that a married couple was running the company from around 2010 until almost 2018; but that may have been a poor role model, as in later years one manager would bring in a spouse and two girlfriends into the company in spite of unsuitable background; the video above ends the series of articles about nepotism inside Sirius ‘Open Source’
THE company Sirius ‘Open Source’ was owned and controlled by a husband and wife when I joined almost 12 years ago. It still had plenty of geeks, including a former Debian Developer. It had a large building, it had staff specialising in different facets of operation (e.g. finance/accounting), and nepotism — if that counts at all — was limited to the CEO. In all fairness, it’s quite common for a couple to run a business. The only other example of nepotism (prior to me joining) that I’m aware of is one colleague who joined because of his boyfriend, who then became a colleague. He later left both him and the company, but again, in all fairness his (ex)boyfriend was technical and a GNU/Linux user. He looked after almost everything in the office, he was polite, and generally amicable. It was devastating to the company when he left several years ago. His certificates and his KDE desktop were still left there in the office when I last visited (even a year after he had left).
Looking back at the whole thing (21 years in combined duration for my wife and I), the CEO’s wife did a much better job than anything that came later and it seems safe to attribute the collapse of the company to the deterioration of that marriage (the CEO’s second marriage, ending around 2018 or 2019). It didn’t take long for him to sell out to Bill Gates (2019) and only weeks later the new manager was bullying both myself and my wife. They were never held accountable for it; not even an apology was offered.
The video above tells stories almost a decade old, corresponding to the text published last night.
