Jeremy Allison discusses Novell departure

Jeremy Allison, the lead developer of the Samba project, has spoken up on his departure from Novell following its deal with Microsoft.

Allison told the Boycott Novell site that the deal was carefully drafted by Microsoft to work around the terms of the GNU General Public Licence and that to their shame, "Novell helped them to do this."

"The intent matters. As I tried to explain in my resignation letter, if you're screwing over some of your major suppliers by following what your lawyers see as the letter of a licence, not the good faith intent of the licence, then you can't expect those suppliers to say 'well done, you really tricked us on that one....'"

LinuxInsider reports gains for the open source Firefox browser as well as Apple's Safari during 2006 - both at the expense of Internet Explorer (IE). IE started the year at 85.31%, down from 89% in 2005.

"In comparison, Apple's Mac-only Safari climbed from 3% in January up to 4.24% in December," says the report. "In January 2005, Safari held only 1.66% of the browser market."

Firefox started in January 2006 with 9.5% of the market, and ended in December with 14%. It, too, has shown a big jump since January 2005 when the browser held 5.59% of the market.

The Fedora Legacy project is in the process of shutting its doors, according to an announcement on the project's site.

"The current model for supporting maintenance distributions is being re-examined," writes project leader Thomas Chung.

"In the meantime, we are unable to extend support to older Fedora Core releases as we had planned. As of now, Fedora Core 4 and earlier distributions are no longer being maintained."