Bonum Certa Men Certa

Exit Interview: More From Jeremy Allison

Red Herring has also spoken to Jeremy Allison, who recently left Novell in protest over the Microsoft deal, in case you were unaware ;^ )

The interview covers much of the same areas as previous articles, with perhaps the most notable quotes being "If you want to sell out, you should ask for more." and "I said to them: I’m not leaving Novell, you guys left me. If I would have stayed, I would have broken my principles."

Interestingly, it seems that Jeremy also has concerns regarding the patent covenant and Novell's compliance with Section 6 of the GPLv2 as well:

Q: How long did you consider it before resigning?

A: I found out about the deal about five days before it happened. I feel like this whole thing is a personal failure. When I first heard I was excited, it was groundbreaking and [I thought] Microsoft was taking open source seriously. The more I looked at the patent provision, the less comfortable I got. I really, really want to like this deal. [I told them] ‘tell me why isn’t a GPL section violation’—meaning you have to pass on the same rights to the software that you received. You cannot say that my customer and I are exempt and anyone that they pass the software to is not exempt. [They] got more and more technical about it but it looked like a patent license without actually using the hideous words, it was just legal sophistry. It was playing with words to go around the intent of the license.

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