Robert Love Resigns from Novell 143
An anonymous reader writes "Robert Love who was the Chief Architect of Novell's Linux Desktop has resigned today. Robert is a prominent Linux kernel hacker, author and journalist in the Linux community.
His blog doesn't specify why he resigned, but after colleague and friend Jeremy Allison's departure from Novell in protest of the Microsoft-Novell deal, this might be the latest fallout from it."
Speculation is Lame (Score:5, Insightful)
The speculation in the submission is unnecessary. Regardless of my personal feelings about the Novell-Microsoft deal, this looks like an opportunistic attempt to re-open an old debate. That's not fair to anyone actually involved.
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Re:Speculation is Lame (Score:5, Funny)
I really wish there were more people like this in our industry. That would attract women.
And women have boobies.
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"Love, Robert" would indicate he wrote with a good post-sex mood. "Love Robert" indicates he wrote after a few beers and signing as "Robert Love" just means the cocaine was good
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Dunno why Love just up and left... could be a better opportunity, could've been retirement, could've been disgust at the company culture... could be that he was sick and tired of having to go to Salt Lake City once a year for Brainshare and put up with the local 3.2% beer. Who knows?
Either way, the fact that such speculation is obvious and rather persistant
Re:Speculation is Lame (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or maybe the editorial staff on slashdot is showing their bias by posting what's blatantly unfounded speculation with no original source, thus trying to reinforce that such speculation is "rather persistant".
So let's remove any possibility of bias:
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Perhaps they do, I certainly don't think they did it out of the goodness of their hearts. But there is still absolutely nothing to suggest Robert Love's resignation has anything at all to do with that deal, which is the unfounded speculation here. Trying to make it look like the 800-lb invisible elephant in the room is at fault regardless, is a lot like talking up violent video games after a violent killing spree where there's no e
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Corel [corel.com] would be a better example. IBM isn't really losing their butts. They did get screwed by Bill, but their butt is doing much better these days.
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I bet nothing can be said that is bad with the MS Novel deal without imagining something that hasn't happened. For crying out loud, Why cannot we just take novel for what they have done instead of what some kook think they might do. This is nonsense and contains more fud and misinformation then anything else.
What happened? Did Microsoft feel the need to bust sales?
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Trying to circumvent GPLv2?
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You can name any actual instance were they have done anything of the sorts, even with the GPLv3 minus the "no deals with microsoft" clause, they haven't attempted to violate it. What you inferring is that people think they might be able to try to do this. And in a time were so many people are judged guilty until proven innocent, I thought I would have seen better from the GPL crowd.
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I hope it is the previous because it doesn't violate anything in the GPL or mean the Novel has done anything personally that doesn't require a vivid imagination and the assumption they could do something in the future.
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Novell gets (real) money for "intellectual property" (ip) in linux which may have been used by microsoft, but since the "infringing" ip is never identified, Novell may in fact be keeping money for ip that rightfully belongs to other linux community developers.
Fact: money was paid.
Fact: the ip supposedly paid for has not been identified.
Fact: Ballmer says linux contains microsoft ip.
Fact: Ballmer says the infringing ip is also containe
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Novell gets (real) money for "intellectual property" (ip) in linux which Microsoft has placed a claim on. And yes, nothing has ever been identified and as far as we know, the claims are completely false. But so does redhat and so does Mandriva, Debian and so on. So there is no difference there. Your last fact illustrates that point well. But your facts also point out how Balmer said everything and neglect to mention Novel denied it from the start. It also goes on to state novel may have,
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Point were it forbids this in the exiting GPL or actually read the licensing before spreading fud. The GPLv3 doesn't even stop this from happening. You seem to be sold on the merits of licensing, have you even read the GPL license?
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This deal is about creating programs that can be used along side GPLed products that make inter-operation of Novel's products and microsoft's product easier and more fulfiling with the consumer. This is no different then Mandriva or Redhat including programs in their pay for distributions and certifying they have a right to use them. T
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Whatever the case, Novell is going to be linked to the M$ deal for some time with business decisions, personnel moves, and market value all discussed in relation to it.
After all... It was a big deal if only for symbolic value. Perspectives were changed as a result.
Regards.
changed indeed (Score:1, Interesting)
Mine was. Before the deal I used SuSe exclusively. I knew that it wasn't a purely free OS, what with YAST and Adobe and NVIDIA binary RPMs being sent along with it...but it was at least MS-free which is exactly what I liked about it.
I switched to Fedora. It wasn't easy to set up, but I have that nice, clean MS-free feeling again when I turn on my machine. Now that I have struggled through the hard part, I like Fedora better than Suse. I won't be switching back.
Speculation is trivial (Score:1)
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Perhaps you can measure the fairness of both actions and find this one much less unfair, but it's difficult for me to believe that any solution to injustice is more injustice.
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Moreover, not seeing it as unfair to Novell does not even require any particular enmity toward it. It's just another corporation, after all.
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Company A does something of which certain other people disapprove. Employee B leaves said business several months later and gives no public reason for the departure. Anonymous spectator C says "Employee B left because of Company A's action of course!"
Is this not FUD? Is FUD fair? Perhaps it's only unfair to a small degree, but that's shallow justification.
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Perhaps it is some mild FUD towards Novell. If the target of FUD is behaving badly on the whole, I cannot see how FUD towards it is unfair. Maybe you can, but I think that requires more slack towards Novell than I think it deserves.
To be more precise, I hold above these specific events the importance of the four freedoms that the GPL tries to promot
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If FUD is not universally unfair--if FUD is acceptable when applied against a group or individual with whom you disagree--then from a certain perspective, Microsoft FUD against Linux or F/OSS is completely fair.
I don't accept that. Therefore, however much I may disagree with a particular group or individual, I believe FUD against that group or individual is unfair
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Can you point out where FUD is the basis for someone's disagreement with Novell?
Suppose you are a cop who disagrees with a hostage taker who threatens to kill ten people. Do you think FUD that will fool the bad guy into slipping up and being stopped is unfair? Your disagreement with him is quite sound in this case, and, yes, his FUD is grossly unfair; indeed, it is his FUD that ensures your disagreement here. OTOH, the basis of yo
Re:Speculation is Lame (Score:4, Interesting)
The FAQ on the Novell/Microsoft deal is filled with business doublespeak, but one sentence of it strikes me: "Novell will continue to promote Linux as the premier platform for core infrastructure and application services." It strikes me because it is the only sentence stating what Novell will continue doing after the agreements. It's a feel good sentence, sounding like "oh, Novell's continuing Linux development," but really explicitly stating the parts of Linux it will continue on. Considering that Novell was actively developing the Linux Desktop, and Robert Love was "Chief Architect, Linux Desktop, at Novell" [wikipedia.org], it's apparent that the Linux Desktop is one of the items Novell will NOT continue.
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What prevents Novell from promoting or hiring to fill the architect position? If you know more than you inferred from a press release, please do share.
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My feelings are quite the contrary.
....It strikes me because it is the only sentence stating what Novell will continue doing after the agreements. It's a feel good sentence, sounding like "oh, Novell's continuing Linux development," but really explicitly stating the parts of Linux it will continue on. Considering that Novell was actively developing the Linux Desktop, and Robert Love was "Chief Architect, Linux Desktop, at Novell" [wikipedia.org], it's apparent that the Linux Desktop is one of the items Novell will NOT continue.
Exactly. A blunt attempt to annoy Suse customers by enforcing their Gnome stuff on the users. SuSe had a groupware product, what did the Ximian guys do: Develop their own. SuSe had a working package management system. What did the Ximian guys do? Mess it up with RedCarpet. SuSe
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Speculation is natural, but fruitless (Score:4, Insightful)
When Jeremy Allison resigned from Novell, the fact of his resignation was known by the public for some weeks before his last official day as a Novell employee. Jeremy had to refrain from doing or saying certain things until he was actually off the payroll - for example he did not sign the petition [techp.org] until then. Love is probably in the same situation right now: known to have resigned, but still to some degree responsible to the company.
We might not get to know how Love feels about the Novell-Microsoft agreement for some time, and should not make assumptions. It may well be that his strongest feelings are about wanting to continue to develop a great desktop, and that Novell might not be such a great place to do that any longer. That's all he mentioned in his blog.
That said, the agreement is a big honkin' elephant in Novell's living room that is not going away. It's unfair to ask people not to speculate, we just have to make it clear that such speculations are vapors until Love himself comments.
Bruce
More importantly (Score:2)
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Suppose his reasons are none of our business, and he never shares. What use is it to speculate (other than my speculation that the anonymous story submitter wanted to kick the Novell pariah yet again)?
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Second of all even if it was unfair so what? Why does a corporation (or two) need protections from unfair treatment on slashdot.
It's not a person, it has no feelings, it's a corporation. It doesn't care about you or any other human being except it's shareholders. It only cares about making money and giving it to it's shareholders.
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"A corporation is an artificial legal entity (technically, a juristic person)..."
A case could be made that the speculation was unfair to Robert Love, and I guess I agree with that, after having thought about it more. However, I agree with you that the original statement--that it's unfair to all parties-- is false. Corporations are people without a conscience that do not deserve fair treatment.
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I would think it would be better in the long term to choose to be good, rather than choose to not be evil (ala Google[1]).
[1] Seems Google's policy is to try to "hire above the mean" (which is a good idea for them), but aiming for "don't be evil" is not aiming "above the mean".
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It's a soul-less, immortal being. Kind of like demons in the old testatement.
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On one hand ... (Score:1, Interesting)
On the other hand this is another nail in Novell's coffin as they suffer through being possessed by Microsoft.
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Yeah, I know one [ubuntu.com]
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...maybe NOW Novell will pay attention? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can grok the 'foot-in-the-door' theory of getting enough interoperability w/ Windows to make Windows no longer matter (or at least ease customers out of the Windows-only lock-in), but man... he HAD to have seen the 'Plays for Sure' fiasco and figure out that the only real winner in any MSFT-3rdparty deal is MSFT, even if MSFT has to screw the partner(s) to do it.
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Novel hasn't done anything wrong outside talking to Microsoft. So what does the deal specifically do that is so bad?
Re:...maybe NOW Novell will pay attention? (Score:5, Insightful)
In signing this deal with Microsoft, Novell (note spelling) has deliberately and disingenuously circumvented one of the key elements that ensures the continuity of the GNU General Public License, version 2. The GPL states that you cannot encumber the license with additional terms (patent limitations, for example), because that would work against the the principle of the FSF's four freedoms: to study, copy, modify and redistribute software.
Novell inked a deal with Microsoft that did an end-run around this limitation by agreeing not to sue Novell's customers for patent infringement. This makes a scenario possible in which an unsuspecting company or individual could use GPL software, assuming that they had every right to do so, only to have Microsoft sue them later for breach of patent. As long as they're not Novell customers, MS would be perfectly within their rights to do so.
It stretches belief to imagine that Microsoft didn't know they were subverting the essence - if not the letter - of the GPL with this deal. But we've known for years now that Microsoft sees the GPL as a threat, and that they are working actively to defeat it using both fair means and foul.
What gets people's knickers in a knot over this deal is the fact that Novell should have known better. They built a major part of their business strategy on the hard work of the FOSS community, and contributed a lot to it, too. But now they've gone and exploited an inherent weakness in the current version of the GPL, and damaged FOSS in general for short-sighted, selfish reasons. In effect, they're poisoning the very well they drink from.
Needless to say, a great many people in the FOSS world, including RMS, Bruce Perens and a lot of others who know a thing or two about this stuff, have castigated Novell for being remarkably stupid. And a lot of us here on Slashdot agree.
Re:...maybe NOW Novell will pay attention? (Score:5, Interesting)
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It doesn't matter if the license is $600, $6 million, or $0.00000006. Regardless of the cost, if it's non-zero it kills the GPL licensing model. Why? Because no matter what, the patent license would be non-transferable. This means that third parties wouldn't be able to exercise their redistribution rights under the GPL, because they wouldn't be allowed to also transfer the patent license.
Make no mistake: this, just like with SCO, is another Microsoft attempt to destroy Linux. The value of Linux is in the G
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Unfortunately, MS wrote into the contract that they can cancel it whenever they feel like it. The terms of the contract to not indicate that afte the contract is cancelled, that MS still won't sue Novell's customers.
The public terms of the contract are of no benefit to anyone except MS. There are a lot of smooth phrases that emula
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There is nothing in the GPLv2 stopping you from placing patented so
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Second, to take a specific example, have you ever tried to fork and maintain a fork of anything critical like gcc, emacs, make, vi, less, gzip, or the Linux kernel? And if the main codeline goes to GPLv3, you'll have to do clean-room development to keep it GPLv2. That makes it far, far more expensive to do
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But no I haven't tried to for anything myself. But you see, they don't have to upgrade anything, they just need to to continue to work with their product. So it isn't the same as devloping everything from scratch. The Linux Kernel will Stay GPLv2. Too much has already been said on that matter to think otherwise. GCC and the GNU tool chain already works so there isn't much to do there unless you change what your working with. These compa
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You are handwaving over the engineering and legal issues of maintaining a fork. Almost every single sentence of your claims betrays this. I'll take your second paragraph, line-by-line, as an example:
1: But no I haven't tried to for anything myself.
So you're telling othe
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No, I'm not telling anyone to do anything. I'm saying that It appears to be likely it will happen and it won't be as hard as you think.
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The Linux kernel is nearly a strawman in this: even if Linus manages to keep its core in GPLv2 (and I'm not sure he can for more than a few years, but
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I don't think it will be all that difficult to maintain a fork that is usable to what makes them money. And I seriously don't think Novel will be d
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Let me paint a picture for you. You've got a group of sheep out grazing in a field somewhere. Then you've got a couple of shepherds. (Perens and Stallman, in the analogy) The shepherds start w
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Jeremy continuing in Samba work under the Novell/Microsoft patent agreement put Samb
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Just because your afraid something might happen in no way means that it would or could. Even if Novel, Samba or Jeremy included code, he would have to pass all rights he give their users to downstream users. Even under the existing GPL. It specifically says so in it. S
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This also however is precisely the point. The "community" is gradually becoming more and more about vague, unwritten, subjective emotional abstractions than anything near as precise as the letter of the law. For anyone wanting to develop/distribute GPL licensed software now, it's no longer enough to merely fulfill the precise written legal requirements of the license.
No Love for Novell? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I guess when people say there is no love for Novell, they mean there is no Love for Novell.
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"NO love here"
and I guarantee you would be the king of all geeks for at LEAST 2 maybe 3 years.
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Next week's headline? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Soon Ubuntu will not even need users -- it will run completely on hype.
Disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
(1) You label those who have started to use Ubuntu as people without judgement? Well, sorry, I don't consider myself *that* clueless. I've used Slackware (since it came on floppies), SuSE since v5 or so, RH from when they started, Mandrake, enfin, to cut a long story short, I experiment. And Ubuntu has gone from nothing to my preferred desktop, with Fedora and SuSE running a close 2nd (although I'm not very impressed with OpenSuSE, and the MS tie in makes it less likely I'll e
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Thank You (Score:5, Insightful)
While everyone grips about Novell-MS, let me instead say thank you.
Thank you for all your contributions, paid for or otherwise, we all benefit from them, often at no cost to ourselves.
I wish you the best in future endeavors.
Re:Thank You (Score:4, Insightful)
Reminiscent of Compaq/HP Merger (Score:5, Insightful)
Similarly, if all the Linux hackers leave Novell/SUSE, who exactly are Novell going to employ to develop the distribution? Not many people looking to make a good career move are going to man a ship whose crew says she's sinking.
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And don't think for a minute that it won't be easy to find developers. When everyone is claiming all the jobs are going over seas, I seriously doubt that some starving outsourced programmer is going to get all ethical and pass up a full time job. He is goin
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It's even more reminiscent of the Compaq/DEC merger. Compaq acquired DEC and then went to all of the Tru64 Unix customers and declared to them: "Hi there. We're going to migrate you to Windows NT." The vast majority of them replied, "Fuck you, we're going to Sun." By the time Compaq realized that enterprise admins will give up Unix when you pry it from their cold dead fingers, it was already way too late, and Sun (and later, Linux) ran away with Compaq/DEC's uni
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Screw You Guys... (Score:1, Funny)
Blame IBM (Score:1)
The 80's called (Score:2)
IBM?! (Score:2)
Surely you misspelled "Microsoft," right? I've read your article, and most of it makes sense, but it really seems like Novell is either aiming for Microsoft to buy them out instead of IBM, or at least for MS and IBM to fight over the UNIX rights (wouldn't that be the battle of the century!).
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Tadaa (Score:1, Funny)
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Speculation, false. (Score:5, Informative)
The MSFT/NOVL agreement was not the motivation behind my departure.
I appreciate the postings by those who recognize that the speculation behind my departure is ill-founded and inappropriate.
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(PS to all the indignant: I used to live in Salt Lake City...)
Re:Speculation, false. (Score:4, Interesting)
In that case, would you mind ending the speculation by simply telling us the reason (if it was business-related; otherwise just tell us "it's private")? Curious minds want to know...
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And he needs to care about your opinion...why, exactly?
If I was going to speculate myself about his resignation, I'd wonder whether he resigned for his own reasons, or whether seeing as Jeremy Allison resigned, he was pressured by the "community" to do the same thing.
Just a thought. I've seen the "community"
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maybe Miguel de Icaca wants the job/title (Score:2)
LoB
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It is true that presidential candidate W. Mitt Romney has built a Mormon Temple (the only one northeast of Maryland; a temple is much bigger than a normal church) near his house in Belmont, a town adjacent to Waltham. But other than Mitt and his many kids, there aren't a lot of Mormons near Novell HQ.
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Eh???? (Score:1, Troll)