Samba developers stay put, thank you very much

On February 6, the blog Boycott Novell ran a story suggesting that Novell‘s Samba development team had resigned en masse to take jobs at rival Red Hat, in protest over Novell’s well-publicized patent agreement with Microsoft. That would be big news, a major coup for Red Hat. Closer inspection, however, reveals that it simply didn’t happen.

The Boycott Novell story, titled “Samba Team Walked Out on Novell?,” quotes a Computerworld Australia story as saying that all five members of a Novell development team working on Samba had quit: Jeremy Allison left for Google, and the other four went to Red Hat.

The Samba project, of course, is the key to providing file, print, and authentication interoperability between Windows and Linux computers. That makes it a critical component for enterprise Linux vendors — and a high-profile potential target for patent litigation from Microsoft.

Allison’s departure was big news; he publicly objected to the Novell-Microsoft deal and was part of the Samba team’s collective call for Novell to reconsider.

However, no officials at Red Hat knew of any new hires from Novell. Furthermore, none of the core Samba developers I talked to knew of anyone leaving Novell for Red Hat. Novell spokesperson Kevan Barney described the story as incorrect.

Backtracking

The Computerworld story quotes W.R. Hambrecht analyst Robert Stimson on a number of other issues relating to Red Hat’s financial state, but the statement about Samba developers leaving Novell appears to be a quote from a February 5 research report rather than an interview. The report is available as a PDF from the W.R. Hambrecht Web site.

In both the “Investment Conclusion” and in a section labeled “Oracle and Microsoft Announcements a Non-Event So Far” it states “The Microsoft/Novell partnership has led to the hiring of roughly 80% of the original Samba development team from Novell.”

That sentence appears to be the original source of the rumor, and looking at the wording, it is unclear. Certainly in context it implies that 80% of some group of Samba developers departed Novell and went to Red Hat, but other readings could be argued. No further elaboration is given, and W.R. Hambrecht did not return requests for comment.

The report cites a meeting with executives from Red Hat as its source of information. When asked about that meeting in particular, Red Hat spokesperson Caroline Kazmierski said that the report “correctly characterizes Red Hat’s briefing” with the analysts. Kazmierski added that “we have three of the top five Samba maintainers on staff at Red Hat.”

No exodus yet

In that, Red Hat may be trying to set the record straight through more precise wording. It claims three of the “top five” Samba maintainers as current employees, rather than members of “the original Samba development team” as mentioned in the W.R. Hambrecht report. It also leaves out any suggestion that its stable of Samba maintainers has benefited from the Novell-Microsoft deal.

That the W.R. Hambrecht analysts came away from their meeting with Red Hat thinking that the Novell-Microsoft deal led directly to a Novell-to-Red Hat Samba developer migration may simply be a misunderstanding. However the rumor got started, though, it is clear that no such exodus has taken place.

Novell’s Barney confirmed one recent departure (apart from Allison’s) but said that to his knowledge, it was unrelated to the Microsoft arrangement. “We still have several Samba developers on staff, in addition to the more than 250 other engineers whose full-time jobs are to develop and contribute code to the open source community.”

Given the intensity exhibited in the Samba team’s letter to Novell over the Microsoft deal and Allison’s exit, it is easy to believe news about Samba developers walking out. But that hasn’t happened so far. The Samba developers I talked to took little interest in the rumors or in who was working where, and a lot more interest in writing code.