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Tridge Speaks Out
Robert McMillan from Linux Magazine posted an interview with Tridge, of Samba and Tivo fame. He's one of the most important folks in all of Linux, and this interview is worth a read. He covers a lot of good material like crap code, bonobo, and what stuff in the kernel is innovative. He also talks a bit about what he might do after Microsoft drops SMB from future versions of windows.
All the interesting positions in Linux are taken?
In the kernel, perhaps, and low-level network services. The barrier to entry is high there, and for the best possible reasons. The OS has become a phenomenon - and very very bright people continue to contribute. Lesser lights need not apply until they're more seasoned.
But that doesn't mean that there are applications out there. Many beautiful tools exist - but truly widespread adoption of Linux will require not just killer applications, but also many, many mundane little applications to fill all the niches where little Windows apps fit.
We all know about StarOffice/OpenOffice. But. . .
A really nice accounting package? A little one, like QuickBooks? Contact managers like GoldMine? Bigger CRM applications with all the bells and whistles?
These are projects that are begging to worked on, and completed. (And yes, I know that good work is being done on all these fronts already).
And these are just the sorts of projects that would convince people (at my company at least) to ditch Windows on the desktop once and for all. Even management is becoming painfully aware of Microsoft's hardball tactics, with this latest round of forced upgrades.
There are plenty of crucial positions left in Linux development. Only the shift is now moving away from the kernel and services, and toward real business applications.
Truly an exciting time. And we're only in the 2nd inning of the revolution.
Forget all the other replies to this post. The entire idea of Linux and it's You-Want-It-You-Build-It approach is very silly. If I want a tool that I can't build, I can certainly encourage others to make it through other means of assistance, IE - software/hardware donations, monetary donations, other project investments and involvement...
Linux is being held back not only by its lack of quality offerings in a few software genres (Such as the aforementioned QuickBooks), but also by the utter *glut* of offerings in some of the other areas. It's really daunting for some people that most Linux distributions come on five or six CDs and Windows only comes on one. I thought distributions were supposed to be like customized toolsets for different people and different situations. If this is the case, then why do all the distributions have almost all the same software?
Hear hear, man. Mod parent UP.
I must say that Andrew seems to be very aware of Samba's direction and future. He also seems to be very honest about the delevopment-to-date. I really liked how he points out the learning phases, from concept to write to rewrite that Samba has taken over the years. My only concern would be that as awesome as Samba is, that Microsoft would dump the SMB protocol completely, rendering the current implementations useless with newer Microsoft OS'. Right now, my employer (like most other employers) use Windows on its servers and desktops, the only exceptions are the CAD designer's that I and my buddy take care of, but we have Samba running on our Sun E450, authenticating to our Windows PDC and it works great. It be really suck if they upgrade our Windows servers to a newer version that doesn't support SMB, but that would just be the next challenge to software developers to once again try and accomadate Microsoft, and once again prove that no matter what Microsoft does, hackers will always find a way. Hooray for Andrew and all hackers like him.
interview with Tridge, of Samba and Tivo fame. He's one of the most important folks in all of Linux,
Someone needs a sound beating with a clue stick. Samba has NOTHING to do with Linux. Samba is an open sourced SMB fileserver. It can run on most any UNIX box, so it runs on things like AIX, BSD, Solaris, SCO, etc la. It also happens to run on any of the 180+ linux distros.
Unless Linux is now a blanket term for any code that might run on some random Linux distro.
Those are not fun. Amateurs/hackers work on fun things. If you want non-fun things, you have to pay someone to do it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What will no doubt continue to happen is new versions of SMB that are negotiated between machines if both support them. That DOS 3.3 client winds up talking a much simpler version of SMB than a Windows 2000 client would negotiate with a Windows 2000 server. So eventually you discover that your old clients don't support some fancy new feature or performance enhancement. But they should continue to work as they have.
When I worked at Microsoft there were stories that SMB would be dropped in favor of something else. One of these was the famous "HTTP redirector", which would be a client that connected to a web server to replace SMB. One big advantage of HTTP is that it allows a file to be read with one single network roundtrip. SMB separates out the operations of open, read, and close a file (those take up 3 separate SMBs). Now the protocol also allows SMBs to be combined in a single request, but various cruftiness that have built up in the protocol prevents you from actually packaging an open, read, and close in one packet and getting a response back with all the data in one roundtrip. This "small file read" test is a favorite of labs doing performance tests, so although HTTP is slightly larger and slower to parse, that all winds up being noise compared to doing the whole small file read in one roundtrip.
Unfortunately HTTP has some *disadvantages*, in particular a lot of the other semantics supported in SMB, like printing and locks and various security protocols, are not supported, so those would have to be invented. The push for an HTTP redirector seemed to be coming from the Internet Explorer and IIS teams (I worked on NT). In fact one IIS person confidently told me about 4 years ago that SMB was doomed. But it continues to live on and the various HTTP redirector projects seem to have stalled. But for all I know it is still bubbling around somewhere (or several places) at Microsoft.
- adam