Seems the latest round of layoffs from Google has hit its open-source projects particularly hard, according to Steven J Vaughan-Nichols <https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/27/google_open_source/>. The one name that immediately caught my eye was Jeremy Allison, one of the chief brains behind Samba <https://www.samba.org/>. Before joining Google, he worked at Novell. He left there in 2006 because he objected to a deal Novell made with Microsoft which was effectively a patent licence for Free software (something which the GPL doesn’t allow) <https://www.zdnet.com/article/in-case-you-missed-it-part-1-jeremy-allison-fights-back/>. While waiting to see where else he turns up, it is worth revisiting this essay <https://www.samba.org/samba/news/articles/low_point/tale_two_stds_os2.html> from shortly before that time, where he does a comparison between the Microsoft Windows and POSIX APIs, and why there can be so many independent, yet interoperable implementations of the latter, and why there can be only one of the former (though the WINE project continues to try to change that).