Novell could not outsell Red Hat, so it sold its soul (along with other souls)

About a week ago, through a writing published in ZDNet and TuxDeluxe, Jeremy Allison shared something that few of us actually knew. He said he was offered a lot of money for Samba and the offer was declined.

One estimate put the price tag on creating the Linux kernel at over $600 million. In the early days of the project I work on, Samba, a commercial competitor who shall remain nameless offered around $40 million for the rights. They were refused.

This is particularly interesting because we recently also discovered that Apple had acquired CUPS and we also saw XenSource snatched. Last November we saw Novell selling out too, as Groklaw put it. Jeremy Allison, a Novell employee at the time, said that Novell was a willing victim. Novell was offered a large amount of money not only to become a victim, but also to victimise those that gave it GNU/Linux. For that, Novell cannot be forgiven.

On Sunday we posted a video of one talk from Jeremy Allison. As tribute to a man who sticks to principles, here is another.