Not everyone at Novell is happy with the recent controversial deal they struck with Microsoft. Some are so upset, in fact, they wanted to demonstrated just how much - by quitting. Jeremy Allison, who is one of the leads of the infamous Samba project, has quit his job at Novell in protest. His reasoning behind it is the stigma that he believes Novell will carry around with them as a GPL violator:
"We can pledge patents all we wish, we can talk to the press and 'community leaders', we can do all the right things w.r.t. all our other interactions, but we will still be known as GPL violators and that's the end of it."Allison acknowledges that the deal may not be a technical violation of the GPL, but says it's poor form to base a deal around a loophole.
Fact and perception are two very different things, and regardless of underlying technicalities, what the community perceives you as can have a huge impact on your business. What impact this will have on Novell's software development remains to be seen.