As posted on his blog, Robert Love has left Novell. This was something that was picked up in a highly speculative article on Slashdot and a similarly speculative Digg posting. A lot of the comments were about whether or not it was “fair” for Slashdot to take a speculative stance, but this is missing the bigger picture.

There’s a really great opportunity for Linux here. Robert Love is truly a great hacker and teacher. I think his book on Linux Kernel Development is an excellent resource. He’s going to be doing something somewhere and I bet it’s going to be very cool.

This is one of the impressive things about Open Source Software. It handles change amazingly well. Even if Cringely is right and the deal is simply meant to disrupt Linux, it is destined to fail. Mostly because great hackers would flee from such a thing instinctively.

It seems that every time a deal is made between Microsoft and a company with great hackers or with great hackers themselves, things fall apart rapidly and usually with the resignation of the hacker. For example, when Daniel Robbins went to work for Microsoft as an open source software guru, he ended up leaving rather shortly afterwards. Now we are hearing about Jeremy Allison and Robert Love resigning from Novell shortly after the announced deal with Microsoft. Truly, this is speculation on the level of Slashdot, but maybe it’s justified to some degree.

The cool part about this is to see what’s next for those folks. Great hackers rarely sit idling around doing nothing. They are control freaks that generally want to get their hands dirty and solve real problems. It will be very exciting to see what problems Robert Love addresses in the future.