08.20.07
There Are Those Who Sell Linux and Those Who Sell Out
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.
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.
Dev Null said,
August 22, 2007 at 5:21 pm
This is one of the most boring videos I’ve seen. Glad to see Allison somewhere else but Novell. And whoever writes these articles sounds more like a Jihad Stallman diciple than someone with good and sound intellect.
What next? Is Novell going to give the UNIX rights to Microsoft? Please!!! Give us all a break and go play in the middle of the highway, it would certainly be more interesting than this article you’ve written.