> Although, while I'm not an expert on France's labor laws, I agree laws in most EU countries are on the side of employees. But that doesn't mean when you hired someone, he/she will be working at the company for rest of his/her life without doing some work. Maybe someone who's expert on labor laws can clarify.

As someone who lives and works in the EU, none of the conditions seems to be particularly unreasonable. If you're talking about someone who isn't working, presumably you'd be firing them for cause. Which you can do: you need to follow a process and document that you're following it, you need to give them explicit warning that their performance is not up to par and give them the opportunity to fix it, and you need to do all of this within a reasonable timeframe.

The Mandriva guy was explicitly not doing that; if you're making people redundant then you're declaring that there was no problem with them specifically, the company just needs to eliminate those positions. If you then rehire people for those positions within the next few months, the courts tend to take a rather dim view of that.