In case you missed it (Part 1): Jeremy Allison fights back

In the "posts you might have missed over the holiday" category, the e-mail Q&A I did with Novell-turned-Google employee Jeremy Allison got some readers pretty stirred up.

(Back story, for those who steered clear of Web news for the past month-plus: Samba lead developer Allison quit Novell just before Christmas, in protest over the Microsoft-Novell technology agreement announced in November. Allison's first day on his new job at Google is today, January 2.)

Allison himself ended up weighing in and defending his opinions about the Microsoft-Novell deal in the comments on my December 30 post. Here are a couple of pithy Allison excerpts.

On indemnificiation:

"The difference between the Novell/Microsoft agreement and indemnification (as Novell used to provide and Red Hat still does) is the direct royalty payments from Novell to Microsoft for use of Open Source/Free Software code. ...That's the part that is (IMHO) violating the GPL, even though the language was very carefully constructed to make it appear as though the payments weren't for a patent 'license.'"

On license loopholes:

"I don't like bugs in my code and I don't like bugs in my licenses. I certainly wouldn't work for a company that produces code exploits, and likewise I don't want to work for a company that produces license exploits."

On being characterized as "anti-Microsoft":

"As for being anti-Microsoft I'm not anti-Microsoft, I'm anti- some of the things Microsoft *does*. There's a big difference. I'm old enough to remember when IBM was in the position Microsoft is now. I could have been called anti-IBM at the time but we're best of friends now. The same can happen for Microsoft if they're willing to change, as IBM did."

If you don't mind wading through the pointless back-and-forth about who is/isn't a troll, many of the other comments on the post are worth a read, too.