FOSSwire

Many people may think that Linux is just something that a group of people decided to make one day. You may think that all that goes on in a day in the Ubuntu world is just development. Wrong.

I am a part of the Ubuntu Ohio USA Local Community Organization (OhioLoCo). There we plan things on distributing and advocating Ubuntu, install fests, conferences, you name it. Our team leader (known as Vorian) considered applying for something many strive to get: an Ubuntu membership.

An Ubuntu membership entitles you to use the Ubuntu name and logo associated with your own name on anything, literally. Business cards. CDs. You name it. You also get a nice and fancy @ubuntu.com email address. These memberships cannot just happen; you must work for quite some time to qualify for them. Vorian was pretty ready for it, and if someone else didn't suggest he apply for membership then, I would have.

Once you apply for a membership, you must show up to a meeting that takes place once every two weeks. This is known as the Community Council. Once the meeting was started, we went through many topics, such as approval of two people to the Forum Council, Community team approval, and finally membership approval. Many people attend these meetings, and one of them is a name you might know: Mark Shuttleworth.

Most of the meeting goes through as a "normal" meeting would. Someone brings up a topic from a list created before the meeting, and it is discussed. There is a group of people, Mark included, that vote on these decisions. However, these meetings are long. I was there for three and a half hours. They are, on the other hand, very interesting and bring up interesting debates.
Come time for Vorian's membership approval, we were all nervous. He had his speech ready, and it was almost time for him to go. Once the previous member was approved, he was up. He gave a quick speech, and was asked if anyone was there to "cheer" for him. Mark even had a comment: "team ohio! land of the famous linuxfest :-)"

We all gave a shout out and showed our support. It was flawless. He was approved, and the meeting continued. However, in our Ohio-specific IRC channel, we were having a party of our own.

Earlier that day was the Forums Council meeting. There, Vorian was voted Secretary of the Forum Council, a high position indeed. He is very well-known among the forum administrators. That might have been part of why it was easier to get a membership also, but I think it was more of his Local Community experience. (Plus the fact that everyone seemed to like Ohio. ;))

(At that same Forum Council meeting, I was also nominated for leader of the "Unanswered Posts Team." Woot!)

Ars Technica is reporting that top Samba hacker Jeremy Allison has resigned from Novell over the recent deal with Microsoft.

In case you're not aware, Samba is probably the most important open source project with regards to Windows interoperability. Samba powers Windows file sharing in virtually all flavours of Linux and most other Unix operating systems (including the Mac) and an immeasurable number of embedded devices (like Storage Area Network devices, for example).

Allison has made a public statement on Groklaw:

I have decided to leave Novell.

This has been a very difficult decision, but one I feel I have no choice but to make.

As many of you will guess, this is due to the Microsoft/Novell patent agreement, which I believe is a mistake and will be damaging to Novell's success in the future. But my main issue with this deal is I believe that even if it does not violate the letter of the licence it violates the intent of the GPL licence the Samba code is released under, which is to treat all recipients of the code equally.

In case anyone might think I gave up too easily, here is a copy of a letter I recently sent to management on this matter.

I know you don't want to hear this, I know *nobody* wants to hear this but I'll not be able to live with this if I don't say it publicly at least once.

Whilst the Microsoft patent agreement is in place there is *nothing* we can do to fix community relations. And I really mean nothing.

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.

For people who will point out to me we don't "technically" violate the GPLv2 here's an argument I recently made on the mailing lists.

"Do you think that if we'd have found what we legally considered a clever way around the Microsoft EULA so we didn't have to pay for Microsoft licenses and had decided to ship, oh let's say, "Exchange Server" under this "legal hack" that Microsoft would be silent about it - or we should act aggr[i]eved when they change the EULA to stop us doing this?"

The Microsoft patent agreement has put us outside the community, and there is no positive aspect to that fact, and no way to make it so. Until the patent provision is revoked, we are pariahs.

Unfortunately the time I am willing to wait for this agreement to be changed to remedy the GPL violation has passed, and so I must say goodbye.

SuSE Linux is technically one of the most advanced Linux distributions, and I am proud to have been a small part of the Team that helped create it. Working at Novell has been a great deal of fun for me, and I will miss many of the great people I have worked with here.

This is certainly not particularly good news for Novell - with the deal already having upset many free software advocates and someone as high profile within the FOSS community as Allison will shake Novell's new-found open source foundations even more.

I know, I think we're all really bored of hearing this story now, but unless something major happens this is probably the last I'll say of it.

Richard Stallman, leader of the Free Software Foundation has publicly said that the Microsoft-Novell deal doesn't violate the GPLv2, but will be addressing the issue of patent licences for the third version of the GPL.

"What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play. Instead, Microsoft offered a patent license that is rather limited to Novell's customers alone."
...
"It turns out that perhaps it's a good thing that Microsoft did this now, because we discovered that the text we had written for GPL version 3 would not have blocked this, but it's not too late and we're going to make sure that when GPL version 3 really comes out it will block such deals. We were already concerned about possibilities like this, namely, the possibility that a distributor might receive a patent license which did not explicitly impose limits on downstream recipients but simply failed to protect them."

The GPLv3 is already a hotly debated topic within the FOSS community, with Linus Torvalds saying that he will not move the Linux kernel over to GPLv3, but the FSF will be moving all of the GNU tools over to the third revision of the licence. What this could mean for Novell is they might be unable to use newer versions of the GNU tools in their versions of SUSE Linux.

However, the licence is a way off yet (check the progress of it here), so we'll have to see exactly what happens.

[via LinuxWatch]