Post-Novell Interview With Jeremy Allison

schestowitz notes an interview with Jeremy Allison, of Samba fame, after he had left Novell in protest over the company's deal with Microsoft. From the interview: "My guess is that the negotiations for the useful parts of the agreement (the virtualization part and the federated directory interoperability part) had, as Ron [Hovsepian] says, been going on for months and just before Novell wanted to seal the deal Microsoft turned up with 'there's just this one more thing we want you to sign...' and in desperation to get the other parts of the deal done they rushed it through."

Comments

Re:Why the Rush?

[Timesprout]

You missed the "My guess" part before that statement. In other words he does not know what the circumstances of the deal were. Fortunately though this lack of information and facts fits the Slashdot speculation model perfectly.

Re:Why the Rush?

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

Note that Ron in the interview doesn't say *when* the Microsoft
request that :

"Their desire to do some things around
IP [intellectual property] came up"

happened. I believe that this request came at the end of
the negotiations, not at the start. I can't prove that,
but but the timing of things makes sense from what happened.

Jeremy.

Novell troubles.

[symbolset]

Also, the company is having some trouble filing reports with the SEC, presumably because of options grants. http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=24382

Just days before this deal was announced they had an interesting 8K report filed: http://money.cnn.com/quote/sec/sec.html?symb=NOVL& sequenceid=1&guid=4732459

They owed a ton of cash that was due in 2024, but callable in the event they failed timely filing of reports with the SEC. Apparently that Microsoft money saved their bacon on that one, since immediately after the deal was done it was reported the money had already been paid out to debtors. Their SEC reports should make interesting reading for some time to come.

Being paranoid, though, I wonder if their accountants or the debtor or both aren't beholden to Microsoft's business interests in some way. That would be really scary.