Jeremy Allison Resigns From Novell In Protest

walterbyrd writes to alert us to word from groklaw.net that Jeremy Allison has turned in his resignation at Novell. "The legendary Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame) has resigned from Novell in protest over the Microsoft-Novell patent agreement, which he calls 'a mistake' that will be 'damaging to Novell's success in the future.' His main issue with the deal, though, is '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.' He leaves the company at the end of this month. He explained why in a message sent to several Novell email lists, and the message included his letter to management."

Comments

Excellent!

[Scott Lockwood]

Now if a few more people apply similar pressure. What I'd really like to see, is the Samba team officially pull support for Novell/SuSE, if not outright inform them they are in violation of the liscense, and their right to use the software is revoked.

Re:Excellent!

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Can the Samba team do that? Samba is released under the GPL, and even though Novell may be violating the intent of the GPL it's not violating the actual license agreement itself. I don't think the Samba team can unilaterally tell Novell they no longer have the right to use Samba. I suppose they could release new versions under a modified GPL license that specifically excludes Novell, but Novell could still use the current version and modify it on their own. It'd just end up in a split of the Samba project - the full GPL'd version and the bastardized Novell/Microsoft hybrid.

Re:Excellent!

[Eggplant62]

Scott!!

Yeah, I'm with you, pal. When I consider Steve Ballmer's comments regarding this deal, it stinks to high heaven. There's no way Novell or Microsoft will ever square this deal in my eyes in light of those patent threats made by the CEO of Microsoft. Novell's proper reaction should have been to turn right around and drop the deal once they heard what that creep was spouting. "Undisclosed balance sheet liability" my arse.

No matter what Novell does, they still look to me to have been bullied into this agreement. Most likely MS came to Novell threatening legal action and this is how they settled it. We weren't inside, and we'll never know, but that's what this whole thing feels like to me.

Re:Excellent!

[GodInHell]

The assertion is that Novell is in violation of the GPL. You can't assert or rather, can't prove that something isn't. I didn't ask you to prove it, just to argue it. Arguments (as used in court) discuss questions of intent, meaning of text, possible conflicts, and proposed remedies.

To the above ACs who feel that delcaring that Novell is not technically breaching the letter of the contract means that the contract is not breached, do some reading up on contracts. The words are open to interpretation - with the goal of divining the intent of the parties. Knowingly misconstruing the meaning of a contract to evade its obvious intent is a breach of contract - according to Englo-American juris prudence.

-GiH

Not a lawyer, just a student.

Re:Excellent!

[DragonWriter]

Can the Samba team do that? Samba is released under the GPL, and even though Novell may be violating the intent of the GPL it's not violating the actual license agreement itself.

I'm not sure that's the case; certainly, Allison's position sounds as if it is that the deal violates at least the spirit and possibly the letter of the license. Certainly, a high profile group of suppliers of GPL software included in Novell's Linux offerings raising the specter of litigation and license violations over the deal would undermine the primary purpose and destroy the value of the deal, which was, after all, to help Novell sell its commercial Linux products by removing uncertainty associated with them stemming from the specter of litigation over the IP violations.

If there is a cloud of GPL-related potential litigation seen surrounding Novell, all its done is traded one potential source of litigation for many potential sources of litigation.

Re:Excellent!

[10scjed]

exactly, Novell is Microsoft these days, sharing PR and sales offices, and spreading FUD about potential infringement since they are in the unique position to benefit from it.

Novell isn't using their patents/IP to FUD against open source, they are using their partner Microsoft's patents/IP to FUD against open source. A technicality perhaps, but still wholly unacceptable.

Re:Excellent!

[eno2001]

This is what I predicted from the beginning. The goal here was fragmentation of the Linux development community. It looks like they could succeed. It's basic "divide and conquer" because there will be some developers who don't see much wrong with the deal and will support the Novell Microsoft deal and there will be others who will not. The ones who don't MAY start new forks/projects and join other distros, or... they may just move on to other things entirely. This ensures a two-tiered Linux world with crappy underdeveloped software in non-blessed distros (Gentoo, Debian, etc...) and second-rate (compared to Microsoft Windows solutions) software in the intentionally stunted Novell Suse Linux and anyone else who decides to sign on. Microsoft very likely wants Novell Linux to be as successful as Apple's Mac OS was pre-OS X. That is to say, "enough to stay alive and prove that there is competition but not alive enough to compete on Microsoft's turf in the profitable business markets".

Microsoft couldn't care less if Apple Macs were all the rage in schools early on because that wasn't one of their markets. Schools aren't as comparatively profitable as businesses. Once Microsoft had conquered the business world, they then started paying attention to schools and libraries and took those markets away from Apple. If the Apple platform actually started to make major inroads in server rooms, office suites, groupware and provided a killer alternative to Exchange, MS would be actively trying to take them down a few pegs again. Many Linux distros are doing exactly that and that's why taking Linux down a few pegs is a necessity to MS. MS doesn't want Linux dead. They just want it to smell funny. Probably something like pee. (I keep doing that)

Re:Excellent!

[lawpoop]

Now witness the genius of the GPL. If you distribute software you have derived from GPL'ed code, you must provide that source code to the public under the terms of the GPL.

If MS/Novell create a better samba derived from the samba team's GPL code, they *must* provide access to the source code. Any improvements MS/Novell make to samba are guaranteed to become available to us, and they can never take it away.

Re:I don't understand this...

[mrsbrisby]

* Microsoft says it will not file any lawsuits against developers over any patent issues

Maybe this is where you're confused.

Microsoft says it will sue users of Samba, but not if they give Microsoft money by being a customer of Novell (because a portion of the SUSE warantee agreement goes to Microsoft directly).

By doing this, Novell is violating my copyright and the copyright of every contributor to free software by redistributing my software to people who do not have the ability to redistribute my software (with all rights they received therein). The GPL expressly forbids this, both in intent and in letter.

Novell is now saying that when I said anyone they distribute my software to must be given the same rights to redistribute that Novell has, and be told as such, that I really didn't mean it. While the GPL says this means Novell no longer has the right to redistribute my software, I strongly suspect they think it doesn't say that either.

The GPL is no longer sufficient for many coders

[pscottdv]

From TFA

"Do you think that if we'd have found what we legally considered a clever way around the Microsoft EULA so we didn't have to pay for Microsoft licenses and had decided to ship, oh let's say, "Exchange Server" under this "legal hack" that Microsoft would be silent about it - or we should act aggrieved when they change the EULA to stop us doing this?"

I think this sums up both the reason why the GPL community is mad at Novell even if they didn't technically violate GPLv2 and why there is a need for GPLv3.

Some are saying that the community has no right be mad at Novell because they aren't technically in violation of the GPL. Fine for them. But many of those that contribute code to GPL projects do so because they believe in the intent of the GPL, which is that all who receive the code are to be on the same legal footing as all others regardless of how they receive it. If the GPLv2 is no longer sufficient to provide this guarantee, then changes are needed. And it is perfectly valid for Eben Moglen to craft the changes to plug specific legal-loophole, zero-day exploits in the GPLv2 such as this Microsoft-Novell deal.

Novell keeps trying to make this deal smell rosy by talking up the interoperability part of the agreement. Are they really so stupid that they do not see that the interoperability part of the deal is not what has GPL supporters upset? They could have made any number of deals with Microsoft to work on interoperability without trying to destroy the foundation of the GPL.

Won't revoke rights; Samba team too good for that

[KWTm]

Because Samba is distributed under the GPL, they won't be able to revoke the rights to Novell as long as Novell stays within the (letter of) the agreement.

Besides, in the past, the Samba team has demonstrated a professionalism that has put their detractors to shame, and I hope they can continue to uphold their standards. Witness what they said to SCO when SCO accused the evil Samba team of spreading the deadly plague of Open Source (all the while distributing Samba with their SCO Linux). Here's the letter from Samba to SCO:

Samba is developed and distributed under the GPL, in exactly the same manner as the Linux kernel code that SCO has been criticising for its lack of care in ownership attribution.
Because of this, we believe that Samba must remain true to our principles and be freely available to use even in ways we personally disapprove of.
Even when used by rank hypocrites like SCO.

Translation: "Up yours, SCO." But they say it in such a way that it will carry weight in business circles. In the same way, Allison's resignation makes a clear statement.

It would be a mistake to do otherwise; if the Samba team says, "Well, then I *un*-give you the code! Nyaah nyaah!", it would epitomise in the minds of executive decision-makers that Open Source is run by a bunch of immature J.Random Hackers From China who will revoke your license at the slightest provocation.

One only hopes that Novell will show some more understanding of how much turd they have now placed their foot in, and make some public gesture to show the IT world that OSS is alive and well. Sort of like what EV1 did. Novell's done a lot of good for OSS. I hope they continue.

It's not about copyright

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue with the Novell deal isn't copyright. It's patents. In countries dumb enough to allow software to be patented (ie, the US), Microsoft could make Samba 100% compatible with Windows and 100% GPL. They'd be able to say, though, if you're not a Novell user they'll sue you for patent infringement.

It's not LGPL

[mangu]

they'll just link to an external library that hides all the new functionality

The beauty of the GPL is that they cannot do that. That's why I support the GPL over all other licences, its track record to this day has been perfect in keeping free source free.

Re:It's not LGPL

[OriginalArlen]

Right, but I think you underestimate the skill of the lawyers and engineers Microsoft will have poring over this problem. How's this for a scenario. Microsoft release a new product specifically for SuSE interop - not just for SMB, but the real value of the Microsoft LAN stuff which is Active Directory. The product contains two main components. A client-side blob runs on the SuSE client and includes ready-to-go config files (note: not software, just configs) to set various stuff up - Kerberos or OpenLDAP, Samba, PAM, CUPS perhaps, and so on. All that software can be made to work well with AD, but anyone who's tried to learn it from the man pages will have also spent a lot of time searching mailing lists for config tips. The software probably has a wizard, it prods the local network and DCs to see what is likely to be well received, makes "intelligent" guesses to recommend default settings, builds the config files and HUPs the required services / daemons. The whole thing would appear in the SuSE installer as something like "Microsoft Network InterOp Kit". The MS-blessed configs would just eliminate the hell of trying to make everything work OK. (I've been using Linux as a workstation and for security and web development work for eight years now, and it's as much as I can do to make icons on the desktop that open smb:// URLs in Konquerer. A keen web dev tried to get his LAMP wiki to use AD authentication, he was messing about with mod_auth_kerb for weeks, every few days he'd get excited & come over asking me to try it again, again without success. The Microsoft-blessed config files can of course be easily read and copied, but they're (c) Microsoft and no other distribution can use them. They can't even read them , go "Aha! I need to set signing to NTLMv2 AES-128 *only* for NMB lookups, not Samba SMB traffic itself" (or whatever it may be) and then write the appropriate lines into their own custom config files. And if anyone looked like getting close, MS would I am sure be happy to kick off a decade or two of lawsuits, draining tens of millions of dollars from the victim distributions and vigorously smearing FUD over the whole GNU world. The end result is that SuSE Linux interoperates beautifully with a Windows AD based network, has a "Microsoft Approved" sticker on the front, and comes with file & print, mail & whatnot all working really slickly. No other distribution can ship the same thing because Microsoft own the copyright on the configs and client-side agent binary. Other distros can attempt to find their own magic configs, but let's face it, we've been working on Windows interop technologies for ten years and although huge amounts of excellent work have been done, Microsoft will always easily be able to FUD corporates by saying it's unsupported -- "Unlike Microsoft's new "Services for Linux" product, included with our selected Linux Partner Vendor, Novell. Here's their number, tell 'em Bill sent you..." No linking to GPL'd software required, no source released, Microsoft succeed in partially subverting Free software. Score: Microsoft 1: Free Software community 0.

I personally think it's a tactic that shows signs of desperation; you can bet they've spent a lot of lawyer-years brainstorming ways to attack Free software, but it looks like they've got something here in the short term. It would be a dangerous move to be seen to endorse Linux even slightly, and shipping software to run on it would certainly do that -- but most of all I think it'd increase the exposure of Windows admins to Linux / Free software, which just increases the rate of attrition of MS mindshare. So in a couple more decades, OSes will be seen as far more of a commodity, and minimal, streamlined feature sets with straightforward modular components. And will include an old .au file of a man saying "My name is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce it 'Lee-nuhx' :)

What about Nat Friedman?

[Bruce Perens]

I've publicly told Nat Friedman, whom Novell is using as the public apologist for the patent agreement, that I think his ethical position stinks, Jeremy's resignation (which I applaud, of course), should reinforce this. Nat should leave too.

Please sign the Open Letter to Novell. I'd like to get that over 3000 signatures at least today. It's at about 2950 now.

Thanks

Bruce

That is correct

[Eric Damron]

Yes, that pretty much sums it up. Novell has always maintained that it hasn't infringed on Microsoft's patents but Microsoft has openly stated that Samba and Mono and other software does infringe.

So what you have is Microsoft offering .NET to the world as an "Open Standard" and then claiming that whoever implements it are using Microsoft's IP that are protected by the patent laws.

Microsoft has never been known for playing fair and it's time for the entire world to work hard to simply make them irrelevant. Don't implement standards that are not truly open. Don't support Microsoft in ANYTHING they do. Demand that they be held accountable for their continued antitrust violations. Microsoft needs to be broken into at least three separate companies in order to level the playing field. This can easily be justified by their continued lawless actions and the effects those actions have on the IT world.