Novel in bed with M$

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2006-11-03 at 19:39 -0700, JT Moree wrote:
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> Craig White wrote:
> > samba is GPL
> 
> what does that prove?  MS doesn't have to give out source code if they
> don't want to.  Who's going to make them?  and even if the courts do
> demand it (like in Europe) . . . re-read my last paragraph.
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Since samba is GPL, a Microsoft employee would have to literally be
firewalled so that contributed code would not taint Windows code. While
I am sure that Microsoft already employs people working on some GPL
projects, they aren't going to be mixing with Microsoft's own Windows
coders for obvious reasons and it seems extremely unlikely that their
role would be to effectively contribute to a GPL project.

Microsoft can do anything that they wish with Samba with the exception
of distributing it, at that point, the GPL license has teeth.

Your paragraph that started..."Of course they will embrace and extend
samba" sort of indicated that you hadn't thought all of this through.

Obviously George was on the mark - you only need to decipher the
virtually identical releases from Microsoft and Novell to see that this
agreement is about Virtualization - which does represent both a threat
and opportunity to Microsoft.

Novell got Xen out of the box early while Red Hat apparently has gotten
things rolling with Fedora Core 6 and expects to be delivering big time
with the soon to be released RHEL 5

FWIW, CentOS has released the re-spin of Red Hat clustering (GFS) and is
still waiting for source rpms for the 'Application Server'

Craig