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In his resignation letter, Allison said Novell's patent pact with Microsoft has crippled the Linux seller's relations with the open-source community. At Google, he'll continue his work on Samba, the open-source project he helped launch. Samba is software that lets Linux servers share files on Windows networks.
"Whilst the Microsoft patent agreement is in place there is nothing we can do to fix community relations...Until the patent provision is revoked, we are pariahs," Allison said in the letter, quoting from an earlier message he sent to Novell management. Allison joined Novell in 2005 after working at Hewlett-Packard.
Groklaw, a site that monitors open-source legal affairs, published Allison's resignation letter Thursday. Allison on Thursday confirmed the letter's authenticity, saying he had sent it to an internal Novell mailing list, but declined to comment further on his departure from Novell.
Google is a major open-source software user and participates in several open-source programming projects. Andrew Morton, a key lieutenant to Linux leader Linus Torvalds, works there, for example.
Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry declined to comment on Allison's views, but said the company still employs two Samba programmers. "We wish him the best," Lowry said.
You win some, you lose some
Meanwhile, Novell has rehired another open-source figure, Hubert Mantel, a co-founder of Suse Linux. He left the company in November 2005, but returned in December of this year. "I had more than one year of time to think about my future and came to the conclusion that the thing I'm most interested in still is Linux," he said in an interview with the online magazine Data Manager.
Mantel also defended the Microsoft deal: "I understand that many people don't like it as Novell is collaborating with the 'evil empire,'" he said in the interview. "But I don't like this way of thinking. We are not working against somebody, but we are working for Linux. Fundamentalism always leads to pain. I think it is a good thing, especially for the users."
Under the Microsoft-Novell partnership, Microsoft purchased coupons to sell 350,000 copies of Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server and agreed not to sue Suse users for patent infringement. The two companies also are working to make elements of each other's software work together. Microsoft is paying Novell a net amount of $308 million for the five-year deal, much of it for Novell agreeing to not to sue Microsoft over patent claims.
But Allison said the Novell-Microsoft deal violates the open-source principles of giving equal rights to all users of a particular program, even if it doesn't technically violate the General Public License (GPL) that governs Samba and the Linux kernel.
"My issue with this deal is I believe that even if it does not violate the letter of the license it violates the intent of the GPL license the Samba code is released under, which is to treat all recipients of the code equally," Allison wrote.
The deal caused rancor among open-source fans. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and original author of the General Public License (GPL), said in November that Novell's Microsoft partnership doesn't violate version 2 of the GPL but that changes coming with the version 3 under development will preclude such deals.
Linux rival Red Hat has pounced on Novell's move, as well. Mark Webbink, one of Red Hat's top lawyers for the company, called Novell's move "appeasement...the sacrifice of principles" in his blog, likening it to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's ill-fated "peace in our time" announcement that he thought would stave off World War II.
And although Novell and Microsoft have scrapped over some particulars of the deal, both companies have defended it. Last week, Novell and Microsoft touted survey results that showed most customers approve.
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#1: totally against the SPIRIT of the GPL, which is described within the document (you must confer ALL of your rights to software which you distribute). Using a 3rd party's promise to "refrain" from suing users, and insisting that WE (Novell) do not possess "rights" from that 3rd party, is a disgusting trick. and;
#2: extremely likely to be prevented by legal updates in the license terms in the future.
Novell *is* the new SCO, Microsoft's new tool to threaten lawsuits upon Linux users unless they pay $$$ to 'license' unspecified MS "intellectual property" under restrictive conditions which MS is free to change when they like.
Anyone who says otherwise is either very stupid, or has chosen to be shill for this sneaky legalese trick.
My thanks to Jeremy for his loud and clear repudiation of Novell's strategy, and also to Google for providing him with a more decent home.
When Novell first bought Suse and decided to end Netware I was sad. Then when I got my first version of Suse after the Novell merger I was sad and wished that Novell had gone with debian distro. Now I wish Novell had gone with BSD.
The reality is that had Novell made this deal with anybody other than Microsoft it wouldn't have been a big deal. The truth is had a company like Red Hat made this deal it probably wouldn't have been as big a deal.
People like drama and that's all this boils down to.
I was hoping to migrate to Linux from XP (not going anywhere near Vista), but it looks as though Apple will be my next computer.
The GPL is a legal document that is completely rooted in copyright law.
It is a not an economic nor a political movement.
You however, are a moron.
I guess I was wrong. Communism and open source are completely different. My apologies to the open source community.
You think that OSS is a free-for-all with no structure or control by a body or person? If you do, you are more retarded then anyone could possibly imagine.
OSS is a license, nothing more. Like all licenses, it has requirements for its use. Unlike many proprietary licenses, it is actually grounded in, and supports copyright law.
To me the GNU GPL is the license closest to Adam Smith's ideal for a capitalist license. It enables defacto competition and lowers prices to the consumer. It is the manifestation of the Invisible Hand of the market pushing the cost of software copies to near zero: the defacto cost of a copy.
Microsoft merely distorts the market. They are stuck in a backwards fascist mindset, harking back to the days of mercantilism and feudalism. Welcome to the enlightenment!
Let me put myself in perspective a bit since I'm sure everybody think I'm trying to start a flame war.
I don't like Microsoft. I refuse to buy Vista because of the license and a few other things. And I'm sure, given the chance, Apple would be just as bad if not worse than Microsoft when it comes to monopolistic practices.
Let me also say that I don't believe I ever called the GPL communistic. I did compare open source to communism. If you go by what Karl Marx was thinking then it's fairly close I think.
What's got me upset with Open Source lately is this attitude from some that everything that doesn't conform to our way of thinking is bad. I'm also not real happy with how people have reacted to the Novell/Microsoft deal. Even before anybody spent time to review the agreement they called it a bad deal simply because it was with Microsoft.
Welcome to the real (capitalist) world.