So Jeremy Allison of Samba fame is going to Google, leaving Novell as a protest over the Novell-Microsoft patent deal. Allison’s departure makes sense: The agreement — with its implication that Linux has an IP problem — casts a pall over the open source movement. It seems inevitable that Allison would walk. But his choice of new homes… ah, now that’s truly provocative. You can view Allison’s choice of Google in two ways. 1) A demonstrably smart guy needs a place to flee. Google hires smarts guys, lots of them. It’s their habit, though plenty of those guys are reportedly sitting around on their hands, thinking deep thoughts and not doing all that much. In that scenario, Google is the ultimate soft landing. Or… 2) Google is signaling something big with this hire. Does this suggest they want to scale out their Web Office offerings beyond Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets? To do that, they would need a high-performance clustered file system to serve files across networks. Now, who would you hire if you wanted to do something like that? How about the guy who developed Samba, an “Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients”? By walking out on the Novell, Allison might be making his point and putting a hurt on Microsoft in the process. Or am I reading too much into this? Technology Industry