Well, it seems like Novell is starting to pay for its follies. Jeremy Allison, one of the lead developers of Samba and also one of the best known FLOSS developers, resigned as a result of the Novell/MS patent agreement.
Groklaw, as usual, has the news, with a copy of Jeremy’s published resignation letter…a small extract, just so you realize how he feels about the whole deal:
The Microsoft patent agreement has put us outside the community, and there is
no positive aspect to that fact, and no way to make it so. Until the patent
provision is revoked, we are pariahs.
“Pariahs” he said…and I have to agree with him. Yes, I’ve been rooting for Novell in Novell vs. SCO, but…now it’s more in the let’s-hope-SCO-gets-sunk way than in the let’s-hope-Novell-wins way, if that makes sense.
Then Mary Jo Foley (isn’t that the name of one of Clancy’s characters in the Jack Ryan series? :) over on ZDnet talks about the fact that he’ll be joining Google and publishes a short email interview she had with him, well worth reading too…specially the two (No response) answers…that silence gives a lot away, in my opinion.
So…let’s wait and see if the stampede starts now.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 at 6:32 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
and another returns (via /. )
http://www.datamanager.it/articoli.php?idricercato=17639
“Hubert Mantel: ‘I’m back at Novell’.”
Of course he would…he is, after all, one of the people who made YaST a proprietary piece of software running on linux, making SuSE a non-Free (as in Freedom) distro for most of its life.
On the other hand, Jeremy is a FLOSS proponent to the bone…and there are others inside Novell that I’m pretty sure are gonna start running from the sinking ship.
Just now bothered to look up FLOSS.
It’s the way they roll “Free” up into one acronym, instead of saying “Free like free beer and free speech” if I understand it correctly.
How did we ever get by without wikipedia? Seriously? We’d have to ask each other on usenet. I blame the rise of the wiki with the fall of ART and AGD. We no longer needed each other. ;)
FLOSS = Free/Libre/Open Source Software.
It’s just the easiest way to cover all the names people know that kind of software by :)