Virtual Linux Open source News - Jeremy Allison on Microsoft-Novell Deal

Samba guru explains why he couldn't stomach the Microsoft-Novell deal. “If you want to sell out, you should ask for more," he says.

Jeremy Allison is a hero in the open source community these days. After spending two years at Novell, he decided to leave the Waltham, Mass.-based software company for reasons of principle right after the Linux-vendor signed a deal with Microsoft (see Microsoft, Novell in Linux Pact and Open-Source Guru Goes to Google).

The agreement will allow Microsoft and Novell’s customers to use the other firm’s intellectual property without being sued. As a result, Microsoft will pay Novell $400 million. However, Mr. Allison and other open source believers argue the pact violates certain rules of the GPL (GNU General Public License), a popular free software license.

Mr. Allison is best known as the co-creator of the Samba project, which lets Linux and Unix servers talk to Windows servers. Mr. Allison contends that the deal does not give equal treatment to all users of the Samba code.

Before he starts a new job at search engine Google Tuesday, Mr. Allison answered some questions from Red Herring.

Q: Why did you decide to leave Novell so abruptly?

A: The resignation letter I wrote said pretty much why I was resigning. The fact that it [involves] Microsoft is completely irrelevant. I’m leaving Novell out of respect for the terms of the GPL. [Novell has] argued with me that it strictly doesn’t violate the terms of the GPL (General Public License) and Microsoft’s lawyers have gone over that very carefully. But it obviously is a violation of the intent of the GPL, which is that everybody has the same rights to the software and nobody has privileged access.

Q: How long did you consider it before resigning?

A: I found out about the deal about five days before it happened. I feel like this whole thing is a personal failure. When I first heard I was excited, it was groundbreaking and [I thought] Microsoft was taking open source seriously. The more I looked at the patent provision, the less comfortable I got. I really, really want to like this deal. [I told them] ‘tell me why isn’t a GPL section violation’—meaning you have to pass on the same rights to the software that you received. You cannot say that my customer and I are exempt and anyone that they pass the software to is not exempt. [They] got more and more technical about it but it looked like a patent license without actually using the hideous words, it was just legal sophistry. It was playing with words to go around the intent of the license.

Q: Do you think you could have made a difference?

A: I wanted to like the deal but I should have complained earlier, and that’s my failure. I let it go and when the actual event itself happened, I watched it on streaming webcam from England, I realized how damaging it was. I have an incredible objection to Microsoft saying ‘Buy Novell and leave everything else.’ I thought [Steve Ballmer] insulted the Novell people. He basically said if you buy anything else you will have to look at serious IP issues. He issued a threat at the event.

Q: What do you think went wrong?

A: The problem was Novell was so eager to other parts of the deal that they didn’t care enough about the patent part of the deal and that was the only part of the deal that Microsoft wanted. What they want is to be able to threaten other Linux users. In my mind Novell gave it away cheap. If you want to sell out, you should ask for more. [Microsoft will pay Novell $400 million]

Q: Do others at Novell have the same sentiments as you?

A: I really can’t answer that one. I don’t think people at Novell are bad or awful people. They just made a very bad mistake and treated their main suppliers very, very shabbily; [they are thinking] well, we did it because it gives us more money.

Q: Do you think the Microsoft/Novell deal will be successful?

A: The people who are using Novell Linux [some of them] will continue to do so. I think the proof of the pudding will be in the market share. I don’t think it will improve the market share in terms of how much Red Hat and Ubuntu have. [Novell and Microsoft] did that to get more market share and that will not happen, so in that case, it will be failure.
All this has done is put things so much under a cloud… I have a lot of friends there, I really enjoyed the work. I said to them: I’m not leaving Novell, you guys left me. If I would have stayed, I would have broken my principles. This is going to simmer and die with the GPL version3 coming out in the March timeframe. I would not be surprised if this falls apart. I think a lot of projects will actually adopt the GPL v3 more aggressively simply because of this deal. [Novell and Microsoft] have found a legal hack on the GPL v2, they have found a bug in the code, and so the GPL v3 is a fixed version of the license.

Q: What was the reaction at Novell when you told them that you were leaving?

A: They asked me to reconsider. I had a lot of discussions with executives and we agreed to disagree. My boss wasn’t surprised when I told him and he’s a great guy.

Q: Why did you decide to go to Google?

A: I had a really, really, hard decision to make. [Mr. Allison was considering several offers]. To be honest, Google is doing some very interesting and exciting things and I think Samba can be an important part of it. I’m not speaking on behalf of Google, and I don’t know what product plans they have. Samba will be used in a very interesting and creative way.

Q: What do you think about Google’s efforts to implement open source?

A: Google’s entire back-end infrastructure is Linux-based. It’s making money by squeezing costs out of those systems and the [by tailoring] Linux to work the way Google needs it. I think Samba will be used in the same way.

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