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Q: What do you think went wrong?
A: The problem was Novell was so eager to other parts of the deal that they didn’t care enough about the patent part of the deal and that was the only part of the deal that Microsoft wanted. What they want is to be able to threaten other Linux users. In my mind Novell gave it away cheap. If you want to sell out, you should ask for more. [Microsoft will pay Novell $400 million]
Q: Do others at Novell have the same sentiments as you?
A: I really can’t answer that one. I don’t think people at Novell are bad or awful people. They just made a very bad mistake and treated their main suppliers very, very shabbily; [they are thinking] well, we did it because it gives us more money.
Q: Do you think the Microsoft/Novell deal will be successful?
A: The people who are using Novell Linux [some of them] will continue to do so. I think the proof of the pudding will be in the market share. I don’t think it will improve the market share in terms of how much Red Hat and Ubuntu have. [Novell and Microsoft] did that to get more market share and that will not happen, so in that case, it will be failure.
All this has done is put things so much under a cloud… I have a lot of friends there, I really enjoyed the work. I said to them: I’m not leaving Novell, you guys left me. If I would have stayed, I would have broken my principles.
This is going to simmer and die with the GPL version3 coming out in the March timeframe. I would not be surprised if this falls apart. I think a lot of projects will actually adopt the GPL v3 more aggressively simply because of this deal. [Novell and Microsoft] have found a legal hack on the GPL v2, they have found a bug in the code, and so the GPL v3 is a fixed version of the license.
Q: What was the reaction at Novell when you told them that you were leaving?
A: They asked me to reconsider. I had a lot of discussions with executives and we agreed to disagree. My boss wasn’t surprised when I told him and he’s a great guy.
Q: Why did you decide to go to Google?
A: I had a really, really, hard decision to make. [Mr. Allison was considering several offers]. To be honest, Google is doing some very interesting and exciting things and I think Samba can be an important part of it. I’m not speaking on behalf of Google, and I don’t know what product plans they have. Samba will be used in a very interesting and creative way.
Q: What do you think about Google’s efforts to implement open source?
A: Google’s entire back-end infrastructure is Linux-based. It’s making money by squeezing costs out of those systems and the [by tailoring] Linux to work the way Google needs it. I think Samba will be used in the same way.