Growing Pains: Jeremy Allison Leaves Novell in Protest
Growing Pains: Jeremy Allison Leaves Novell in Protest
Written by Bryan Richard
Thursday, 21 December 2006
Jeremy Allison -- best known as one-half of Samba's leadership team with Andrew Tridgell -- has resigned from Novell in protest over the company's patent agreement with Microsoft.
Allison, who left HP to join Novell in April of 2005, will leave the company at the end of the month. He was Novell's Lead Developer on the company's Samba team.
The announcement marks a bittersweet end to a year filled with widespread recognition for Linux and Open Source's role in enterprise computing. Several announcements this year have put the Linux community on edge but Allison's resignation illustrates one of the biggest challenges facing not just Novell but all companies working in the Open Source space: how does a software company marry the needs of the corporation with the needs of the community.
What's interesting about Allison's reason for leaving Novell is that it does not stem from a concrete threat to Open Source in the near term. Rather he's leaving the company because of a personal conviction that it is wrong for him to support Novell when the patent agreement with Microsoft "violates the intent of the GPL licence [sic]."
It's not really our place to condemn or applaud Allison's reasons for leaving Novell. They are his own and such strong feelings concerning a philosophy of software are a rare thing. We wish him the best of luck.
In Allison's letter to Novell management, however, is this statement:
"Whilst the Microsoft patent agreement is in place there is nothing we can do to fix community relations."
This pretty much sums up the problems of an Open Source software company: serving two masters is difficult. Work to keep the shareholders happy and the community finds you in the wrong. Focus on the community and bottom line suffers. Esprit de corps is a nice thing for corporations to encourage, but it's not the basis of many business plans.
Companies like IBM and HP can invest heavily in Open Source projects because "revenue from Linux" for them means "Linux servers." And those numbers are in the billions annually. Novell can only offset the cost of Open Source software with, well, Open Source software. And in some eyes, any moves to ensure their survival categorizes them as a pariah whether it be an alliance with Microsoft or selling boxed software.
Which begs the question, can the needs of the community and the needs of the corporation coexist for an Open Source software company?
Novell, for their part, has been struggling with this since acquiring Suse. Suse co-founder Hubert Mantel, left the company in 2005 stating, "This is not (any) longer the company I founded 13 years ago." At the time some attributed his leaving to Novell's decision to standardize on the GNOME user interface over KDE and culture clashes with the Ximan team (Ximan's software is based on GNOME).
Following Mantel's departure, the company went on to release SLED 10 to widespread acclaim. Proving that opinions in the Open Source community can be extremely strong, but don't necessarily align well with where a company or an industry as a whole is headed.
Interestingly, Mantel made the decision this week to return to Novell indicating he thought the Microsoft alliance was a positive move for the company.
So long 2006. So much success. So many unanswered questions.
Bryan Richard is the editorial director of Linux Magazine.
http://www.linux-mag.com/content/view/2838/
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Suse founder returns to Novell
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39285227,00.htm
Suse founder returns to Novell
Richard Thurston ZDNet UK
Published: 20 Dec 2006 16:29 GMT
The co-founder of Suse has returned to the company just one year after he resigned.
Hubert Mantel rejoined Novell this month, where he is heading up the kernel quality assurance team. Novell acquired Suse in 2003.
Mantel's appointment marks a significant U-turn, because his departure was not on the best of terms. In an email sent at the time of his departure, Mantel fumed: "This is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago."
Mantel's message now seems to have changed. In an interview with Data Manager Online, an Italian news site, he was asked why he left Novell. He replied: "Basically, I was just burned out. After many years that consisted of nothing else than work and some unpleasant experiences with our investors, it didn't take very much to throw in the towel."
But few would argue with Mantell's comments that Novell has changed significantly, and this year has been no exception. Novell signed a deal with Microsoft in November to co-market each other's solutions, a partnership which has faced scorn from many senior members of the open-source community.
Mantel says he supports the deal. "I think it is a good thing, especially for the users," he said in the interview. "I understand that many people don't like it as Novell is collaborating with the 'evil empire'. But I don't like this way of thinking".
"Fundamentalism always leads to pain. What's important is that Linux is free and will remain to be free," Mantel said.
Mantel is well known for developing SLS and Slackware, two of the earliest Linux distributions, on which Suse is based.
Novell made another appointment on Wednesday with the appointment of a European president. Volker Smid was promoted internally from his previous position as general manager for Central Europe.