Novell hires top Samba programmer from HP (News.com) [LWN.net]

News.com covers the hiring of Jeremy Allison by Novell. "Novell has hired Jeremy Allison, one of the core programmers behind a widely used open-source project called Samba. Allison previously worked for Hewlett-Packard. He said he made the switch because he believes that he can benefit from the experience Novell programmers have in the area of file servers. "These guys know a lot about file sharing," said Allison, who starts the new job on Thursday."

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NCP to Free software?

Posted Apr 28, 2005 18:39 UTC (Thu) by sphealey (guest, #1028) [Link] (3 responses)

The Netware Core Protocols (not to be confused with networking protocols such as IPX) have been the most jealously guarded secrets in the technology world for 20 years if not longer. Giving a Samba core team member access to the NCP code implies that Novell is really throwing the dice on Free (or at least Open Source(tm)) software. That would be quite an event IMHO.

sPh

NCP to Free software?

Posted Apr 28, 2005 18:59 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't see any mention of Mr. Allison intending to work with NCP code... not that I have any info saying he's *not* going to, but it doesn't say that in the article...

NCP to Free software?

Posted Apr 28, 2005 23:51 UTC (Thu) by mepr (guest, #4819) [Link]

Not if he's just using the client api's, assuming that they are open.
There must be access to apis given that boatloads of oss apps have been ported to netware.

NCP to Free software?

Posted Apr 29, 2005 20:22 UTC (Fri) by tbird20d (subscriber, #1901) [Link]

This is nonsense. The NCP protocol definitions have been available publicly for at least a decade. When I was at Novell 10 years ago, they were easily accessible in various network analyzer products, including Novell's own LANalyzer. There's no secret sauce in NCP. However, there *are* numerous indications that Novell is deeply committed to Linux, the hiring of
Jeremy just being one of them.