Jeremy Allison Quits Novell in Protest over Microsoft Deal
A high-level programmer has resigned from Novell, citing the company’s patent deal with Microsoft as the reason. The patent deal between Novell and Microsoft is designed to let the two companies collaborate on new technologies that will allow Microsoft’s Windows to operate with Novell’s SuSE Linux.
In his resignation letter, which appeared on watchdog site Groklaw.net, programmer Jeremy Allison wrote that while the patent agreement is in place, he believes there is nothing that can be done to fix relations with the open-source community.
“We can pledge patents all we wish, we can talk to the press and ‘community leaders,’ we can do all the right things…but we will still be known as GPL violators and that’s the end of it,” Allison wrote.
Allison will now report to Google, where he’ll do work on Samba, the open-source project he helped launch.
Mixed Reactions
Because the open-source community is a sizeable one, reactions to the deal between Novell and Microsoft have run the gamut from outraged to congratulatory.
Bruce Perens, open-source leader and cofounder of the Open Source Initiative, created an online protest site featuring an open letter to Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian. So far, over 3,000 people have added their digital signatures to the online document.
Perens and others are very vocal in their criticism, believing that Novell has put a widely used license at risk.
“Users take value from the community and don’t return much, but we like to have users so they are definitely not free-riders in an economic sense,” he said. “Parasites take value from the community in a harmful way, and that’s the way I’d rate Novell now, for engineering a very deliberate breakage of the one license used on two-thirds of all open source and slapping the developers of their own product in the face.”
Other Side
Novell, not surprisingly, has defended its…
