Jeremy Allison resigns from Novell

[mdlbear]

From this post on Groklaw, we learn that Jeremy Allison of the Samba project has resigned from Novell over their patent deal with Microsoft. His statement is quoted in full in the Groklaw article, and includes a letter to management.

As many of you will guess, this is due to the Microsoft/Novell patent agreement, which I believe is a mistake and will be damaging to Novell's success in the future. But my main issue with this deal is I believe that even if it does not violate the letter of the licence it violates the intent of the GPL licence the Samba code is released under, which is to treat all recipients of the code equally.

In case anyone might think I gave up too easily, here is a copy of a letter I recently sent to management on this matter.

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I know you don't want to hear this, I know *nobody* wants to hear this but I'll not be able to live with this if I don't say it publicly at least once.

Whilst the Microsoft patent agreement is in place there is *nothing* we can do to fix community relations. And I really mean nothing.

As far as I know this is the first such departure, but it is unlikely to be the last.

Comments

[kennita.livejournal.com]

I hope not! I hope people can who own or work with Novell products can find alternatives, and switch over, and send email to Novell and other forums explaining why.

[mdlbear]

That's happening already, especially with the SUSE Linux distribution. The nice thing about Linux is the total lack of vendor lock-in.